Google Expands its Flutter Development Kit To Windows Apps (venturebeat.com) 41
Google has announced that Flutter, its open source UI development kit for building cross-platform software from the same codebase, is finally available for Windows apps in alpha. From a report:For the world's leading desktop operating system with some 1 billion installations of Windows 10 alone, this has been a long time coming. Flutter's alpha incarnation was initially launched at Google's I/O developer conference back in 2017, before arriving in beta less than a year later. In its original guise, Flutter was designed for Android and iOS app development, but it has since expanded to cover the web, MacOS, and Linux, which are currently available in various alpha or beta iterations. Developers have had to consider unique platform-specific factors when designing for the desktop or mobile phones, such as different screen sizes and how people interact with their devices. On smartphones, people typically use touch and swipe-based gestures, while keyboards and mice are commonly used on PCs and laptops. This means Flutter has had to expand its support to cover the additional inputs.
Write once, run everywhere? (Score:2)
Write once, run everywhere? Wasn't that the original (pre-Oracle) goal for Java?
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Isn't that what C is (still) for?
Will fail as bad as metro/uwp apps (Score:2)
Re: Will fail as bad as metro/uwp apps (Score:3)
One of the ways or reasons Windows sucks compared to mobile apps is the lack of framework and architecture with the OS compared to IOS and Android.
For example you don't hear about an Android app being a security hole ever due to it being tied to so many services and things underneath. This makes mobile apps more secure and reliable.
When a program or OS crashes it means it looses control of handling it's memory or was looking for something now there. It means insecure as a hacker can manipulate this by contr
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Cross-platform frameworks for desktop works pretty well. Cross-platform frameworks for phones and tablets work pretty well. But those two ecosystems have such vastly different UI requirements, it's always been a disaster when designers try to shoehorn one paradigm into another.
Maybe someday someone will get it right. Or many enough people will get so comfortable with phone and tablet UIs that they'll accept those limitations on their PC, to the consternation of power users. For now, I'm not holding my b
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For what it's worth, you can write native Win32. This isn't "webby spy on you crap" (unless you write web-based spyware with it :)
In case you're interested in finding out more, there's a whole series of examples here for you to play with: https://medium.com/@timsneath/... [medium.com]
[Disclosure: I'm a member of the Flutter team]
Dart (Score:1)
Re: Dart (Score:2)
Whatever happened to go? Wasn't that supposed to be thee language post Java?
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Re: Dart (Score:2)
I hate to agree with you but I have argued the same. .net core is on Linux and open source but it lacks many apis that Windows Server and the full MS .net stack have even if it ties your program to Windows.
Oracle has dashed any hopes of a free Java that gets regular updates to the language spec and compiler with it's lawsuit to challenge anyone making a clean room implementation.
C# today and node.js could have been Java 2020 and fast and modern if Sun and Oracle didn't botch it for 20 years
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.NET still isn't supported on nearly the number of architectures as Java. I'm sorry, all these claims that C# is going to take over the world are just marketing speak by MS. A language is just a fucking language, and Java may have some painful aspects, but the number of libraries out there and the number of platforms I can run Java programs on just dwarfs whatever MS has come up with.
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Bullshit. There are JVMs for a helluva lot of JVMs out there. Microsoft has basically targeted Linux, and Mono runs on BSD.
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Java is incompatible with itself. It is such a nightmare to support Java 7 with IE 8 at work but our apps won't work with anything else as only update 144, not 143 not 145 but 144 is the only one with Oracle that won't through an exception error at runtime.
This also meant it is tied to Internet Explorer and Oracle won't let us upgrade unless we pay them 5 million dollars. What a joke.
I am not saying Mono and C# makes people fart rainbows and solves world hunger and peace, but other languages took over where
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It sucks that you're still tied to the Java plugin and IE, because the world has most definitely moved passed that. With HTML 5, node.js and the like, I'm not even sure why what's running on the back end is even a major issue. Whether you write the server side in Java, C#, Python, Go or whatever, that's outside the equation now. All I'm saying is however difficult Java is in some aspects, it's penetration is huge, and no matter how much .NET fans like to pretend, if you're going into the enterprise world, J
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The nesting gets annoying, but it's just a good sign that you need to refactor your code. I like it as a learning tool for new students because of it.
Once you get into the habit it's kind of nice.
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I assume you're referring to Lars Bak, who founded the original Dart team. Dart is likely used by three orders of magnitude more developers since those days. He built a great language foundation, but adoption came later, as it tends to given how ecosystems develop. Flutter has 100,000 apps in the store, all built with Dart, and GitHub's last survey showed that Dart is the single fastest growing language: https://octoverse.github.com/#... [github.com] so I suspect this premise doesn't stand up to close scrutiny.
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Minority Platform (Score:2)
With Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android all unix-lineage platforms, Windows' billion installs make it the minority platform.
How does it feel, Microsoft?
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... and now you know why WSL is so important for them.
this is not getting adopted (Score:3)
Those guys are using react native. They're not using Flutter.
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Re:this is not getting adopted (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm watching too. I work with Invertase and am the maintainer of react-native-firebase, react-native-device-info and a couple others. react-native-firebase is from Invertase and they also work on FlutterFire (which you could think of as "flutter-firebase".
I also have a cross-platform app written against reactxp / react-native APIs.
So I'm definitely paying attention.
Flutter is only getting adopted now, so high-paying (typically a bit more conservative clients) as middle or late adopters will not see it yet at all, it's too new.
But it's coming. I'd prefer if my tech bet on react-native was going to win but I'd put $1 on Flutter now. The management structure of react-native is effectively non-existent and the "core" only cares about what is vital for Facebook, so they resist attempts at true cross platform (the non-iOS apple platforms like tvOS, macOS, watchOS, ipadOS - seriously it's a fork?, the web - seriously it's a 3rd-party library to support web?, and windows - seriously it's a fork?).
To me, that means it's dead in the future. If Flutter treats all platforms 1st class it will win even with the choice of Dart. It will do so for the same reason react-native became popular in the first place (truly cross-platform and open...) but with current innovation vs react-native stagnation.
Pains me to say it.
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Even if react-native were to "lose" it will be years going down as it was years going up, there is never a cliff really for adoption, so I think you could be right and even if you were wrong it's not like all the sudden everyone leaves the room and turns the lights off.
The competition isn't a bad thing either, even as it stands. Perhaps seeing what true "all platforms one codebase" looks like (with great tooling) as Flutter has now is the kick in the pants react-native needs to finish it's original cross-pl
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"Flutter has kind of been around for a while". Is there some verifiable fact in there? I don't see one
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] approximately 3 years, but less than 2 as "stable"
Vs approximately 5 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] - though of course it's always both used in production and still 0.x.
If you assume it takes maybe 6 months to build an app worth anything, then you could say Flutter has about 1.5years of worthwhile existence and react-native has 4.5 years
I would expect "traction" (s
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"There are no facts. Just opinions."
Nietzsche
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I'm sorry, you stated something involving dates and times. I expected something more concrete, since time is observable
I looked in to Flutter/Dart (Score:3)
It reminds me, in some ways, of MFC from back in the 90s. "Let's sink huge development effort in to a framework controlled by a corporation, what could possibly go wrong?".
I guess every generation has to learn this lesson. Let the CWinGoogleApp-ing begin!
I don't think it's about write once, run anywhere (Score:2)
As other posters have pointed out, the differences between platforms means that you often can't write once, run anywhere. However it is nice to be able to learn a single system and then use it to write software on a large number of platforms.
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I also like the possibility of prototyping some simple app natively on linux and only worry about phone/tablet compatibility once I know the idea works and is worth pursuing.
I don't do mobile development professionally but I do occasionally "want" some simple program or missing feature. I don't want to spend all my time messing with emulators and crap until very very late when the program is almost ready and I know it works and that I will probably use it. So, I prefer to develop natively until the very las
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You are correct, but I feel like I should point out an app that you expect to run on Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux desktops is probably pretty generic in nature. As in we're not dealing with much beyond being an interface to a much larger cloud/network based system.
It's a fancified webpage, basically.
As such I wouldn't expect it to nicely deal with executing multiple processes on different CPUs, or have a handy IPC mechanism, but for fetching data, displaying it, and letting you smack another API