Blue Soft has designed a member networking application for the CCI France International network, using the recently launched Flutter framework, powered by Google. With Flutter, hybrid development, hitherto unconvincing, has clearly reached a new level, in terms of performance and simplicity, as well as aesthetics.
The framework Flutter at the peak of hybridization!
Released at the end of 2018, the Google Flutter framework is already in version 2.8, and the prognosis is eminently good. Just look at our own developers Blue Soft and the enthusiasm they're expressing for this technology. Easy to use, Flutter is all about beauty. It has forged a place of choice in the hearts of our teams, especially and strangely, among those under 30. In our article on how to make a career in development, we recommend the usefulness of an early focus on a particular technology. The Flutter framework, for example, can be a very good choice for a career start.
The Flutter framework doesn't just appeal to young developers. It's succeeding on a much larger scale, as evidenced by the 120,000 stars awarded on GitHub. This success should be compared with the 95,000 stars awarded to its most direct competitor, React Native, which is 4 years older.
Because Flutter is part of an already abundant context of hybrid application development tools, allowing to develop once for several platforms, mainly iOS and Android.
React Native, Xamarin, Appcelerator, Ionic already offer to simplify the life of developers, whether it is to maintain or evolve a product without tedious redevelopment. However, the frameworks on the market have never convinced for long in terms of performance and display results.
As a result, faced with too many specific code requirements and an increasingly long adaptation time, companies end up turning to native technologies to pursue their mobile first strategy more serenely and with better results.
It's not at all certain that history will repeat itself with the Flutter framework.
A new language, new perspectives for the Flutter framework
As soon as Flutter was released, our teams chose to test the framework on internal application projects and evaluate its potential. The quality of the real rendering, on target platforms, blew us away. The adaptation time, reduced to a minimum, confirmed the promises of the open source SDK.
While native solutions still have a long way to go, hybrid tools pale in comparison to an SDK that largely eliminates performance issues, thanks to its graphics engine that displays a fast and light final rendering.
Of course, a cross platform language will always require more CPU, ram or battery than a native language but Dart is a very serious alternative to JavaScript. Close to C and C#, it is reliable, readable and easy to learn. This accessibility is due in large part to the widgets, which are the main components of an application developed with Flutter, and to their tree system. Flexible, they allow to create a complex user interface quickly.
An SDK monitored, tested and approved at Blue Soft
For the moment, there are no Google certifications on Flutter and the community, although already very active and growing, still offers few training materials.
At Blue Soft, the decision to adopt it for certain projects was based on several arguments, beyond the enthusiasm it generates among our engineers. On the one hand, the sdk is supported by a giant. If Google has not always maintained all its products, its sponsorship remains a guarantee of sustainability. On the other hand, large companies, such as some car manufacturers, have already adopted it.
Finally, and because we are only as good as our own efforts, Blue Soft takes a methodical approach to selecting new technology. And Flutter was no exception. It is therefore with more than a year of hindsight, after several phases of Proof of Concept, confrontation with the UX UI and guarantee of viability and security that we successfully use it today for our customers.
To explore Flutter from a purely technical point of view, check out our articles at Code Insider
