Hey this is 'The Daily Overpass.' My name is Eric and I make Apps. Now today I want
to talk about: Why I'm very excited about flutter.
All right so today I'm going to talk just a little bit about flutter. Because
one of the questions I get asked a lot in the live streams or by email or chat
is: Hey Eric what do you think about flutter? Or what do you think
about flutter versus react native? And my answer is always the same. I'm very
excited about it. I probably talked about it on this channel, on one of the daily
videos before, that it is something that excites me. Right, but I never go into
detail about why I like it. In fact it's the one language that, when I do have a
bit of free time, it seems like the free time is shrinking a lot of the time, because
we got so much client work on, we got so many projects going on, that when I do
have a bit of free time I'm doing the tutorials and trying to learn the
flutter side of things. Because I think it's, I think it's the way forward for
mobile, I really do. I think it's going to replace a lot of the Cordova based
applications that we're using. I think it's even gonna replace React
Native personally, but you can't be sure. So there's some things I really like
about it, so I made a list, so that I can be a bit more specific, because
I'd rather say: "I think this could be really cool." So the first one is this
cross-platform. See, cross-platform is nothing new. You've got Xamarin, you've
got React Native, you've got Cordova and Ionic, so that's nothing new. Every
single one of those, lacks something to me. Right there was always some reason
why: Oh it's great because this cross-platform if you go to both
platforms, but there's always that but. Like with Xamarin, you still have to do
the Wyss wig editors for iOS or for Java, you still have to do that kind
of stuff. You have to kind of know how Java, well how the Android platforms work
and the iOS platforms work in order to do it, at least in my experience. If
you're a Xamarin developer, and you disagree with me, by all means. By the way
this is all opinion. This is what I think, why I'm excited about about flutter. So
there's that. People would ask what I think about Kotlin. Right, when
Kotlin came out. And thing about Kotlin was: it didn't solve any problems for me.
I didn't have a problem using Java for native Android development. So Kotlin came
along and I wasn't really that interested. But with Flutter coming in as
a replacement to something like React Native or Ionic that's something that
that interests me, because I still have those problems. React Native is probably
the close second to flutter for me, however I get
dependency hell, where you're trying to, seems like every time I try to compile
something, something has changed, and I'm going through and trying to change my
NPM settings. There's some dependency, some other library that's changed and
I haven't found that so far in Flutter, and maybe that's the case. The second
thing I really like about it, is there's no with Wysiwig editor. Right, there's
nothing that, it just, you code, it renders on the screen and it just refreshes like
that. They're not trying to dumb it down by including a
drag-and-drop XML interface or anything like that, it's just it's just code. So
you go through and as you do it you see that immediate feedback and do that, and
I really like doing that. I like doing that when we're doing web development.
I like doing it all throughout the place, just because you have a little bit
more control over it, but it might be daunting to somebody just starting, to
not have, not be able to just see everything and drag it on there. And you
can't divide up that work if you wanted to. So theoretically you can give the XML
Java files to a designer and they could work on, but I've never found that to be
a very easy thing to do. So the second one is it's very fast to load. It's very
fast to load, specifically on a device. Because we do a lot of ionic
development. We used to do a lot of Ionic development, and the thing
I loved about Ionic, is having it in a browser, and you just get that
immediate feedback. If you go from Native to Ionic, and you you notice how quick
that is, it's a complete game-changer because you just get that fast feedback.
The thing about Ionic is, it runs in the webview and that's something that
I've just never really been comfortable with. So you're getting the same thing with
Flutter because you're making these changes, and you're running it, not,
you can run it in an emulator, but you could do it on a device too, and
you get that hot reload thing, and on Ionic you get that hot reload thing, for me
it always seemed to break every so often. There's always a new version, something
comes out, there's braking changes, I got another library, some dependency
somewhere I need to change, and that's you know, that's something. The fourth
thing that I really like about Flutter, is the dependency hell. I haven't
noticed that yet, and it's still in beta, so you know it hasn't had all that many
updates yet. We do a lot of React Native development now. We used to
do a lot of Ionic and Kordova development. And it seems like every time
the developers would work on something, I would get the code from git, I would
try to run it locally, and I don't have some sort of library,
and I gotta keep going through, and even though it's specified in the
package.json, there's some other dependencies somewhere. And we and it
seems like we spend so much time just trying to reconcile our development
builds between developers, that it just, it kills me. Or there's a
change coming through your wondering should we upgrade to this new version?
What will it break in terms of our legacy applications? And we spend so much
time dealing with things that are broken, that it's just that it just it's HELL!
It's dependency hell. The last thing is just the excitement about
it. Yesterday there was a Flutter conference it was streamed. Now I'm
filming this before this, so I haven't seen it. But we do see Google, especially.
Even though it's an open, they're sourcing it that you see Google,with a
lot of energy behind it,and that's that's a good thing. That means I started
to think, because Google is Android, you think there would be a lot of
interdependence between them. Even if IOS for some reason had an issue
with it, we do see the the android market share being 80%, and i think i just have
a lot more trust in the fact that there's so much energy behind it, so much
enthusiasm, and they have the budget to really take this far away. So that's
everything. Those are the five reasons. The five big reasons why I'm
excited about Flutter. Now there's some other things that I do find a bit
worrying, just in terms of taking on a project. The first one is in Beta. So I do
find issues even just doing the the minimal bit of coding that I've been
doing on it, that just things don't work right. I have to keep restarting to
keep restarting Android studio, or restarting the emulators, or you know
switching off the device and things like that. But I think these are minor
teething issues that like I said it's still in beta, hopefully we won't be in
beta ,but but it is. The second thing that I'm not quite sure about is: It
uses dart as the language. Now dart is syntactically I find it very
syntactically similar to to JavaScript, and Java, and all the other curly bracket
language. You've got the curly brackets. You've got the semicolons, all that kind of stuff, so
that's cool. However I don't have any other for dart yet. If I do
something in JavaScript, I can use JavaScript everywhere. Right if I even if
I do Java, I can use it in more than one place, but with dart I just have that. So
it's learning that new language, which it doesn't seem to be too difficult to
pick up. But it's just is something that I just it's not as portable yet as I
hope to. I know they're talking about dart being of this big language and
everything and it is compiled, so it should be faster than JavaScript, but you
know it is what it is. And then the last one here, the last thing that I'm
skeptical about when we come to doing dart development, is or doing flutter
development, is if PWA take off we can't reuse that code to do a progressive web
app. Or if we have a client that says: "Okay now, we want a website." We can't
reuse any of that code, because it's in Dart.
So we're committed fully to the app platform. And also, because it is so new, I
find I find it very difficult finding developers who know Dart. I mean
developer who wants a job as a software developer, they're looking for the
largest number of jobs that are available, and right now there's not a
lot of companies looking for Flutter development. It's more people who are
learning flutter are interested in doing their own things, not so much people
looking for a job. So it's really hard to find Flutter developers, at least in
my experience so far. So that's that's just me, that's entirely opinion. I just want to let you guys know
so next time we have that question: "What do you think
about Flutter?" That's what I think about Flutter. I'm very excited about it. I
think it's gonna be, I think it's gonna be big going forward. You know I'm more sure about Flutter, than I am about progressive web apps. Progressive
web apps, we said it on the last live stream, that I'm afraid it's gonna be
like the minidiscs of of software development. Where everybody, all the
technical people are telling you how much better it is, but for whatever
reason, the mass public is not picking it up. Right that's what I'm afraid about
with progressive web apps. And then again I could be wrong. But I'm really excited
about Flutter. I'm really hoping that in the next six months we move most of our
stuff, or most of our newer projects into Flutter and out of some of the current
platforms that we're using. So let me know what you guys think. I'd be really
interested as for those of you guys out there with software developers,
especially if you're using Flutter. What do you think about it? I mean what do you
like about it and what do you dislike about it? If you're not touching it why
are you not touching it? If you're jumping full-on into it, what excites you
about it? I really to hear that. Anyway that is it for today.
This was a very long one, sorry. That is it for today. I'll talk to you guys again
tomorrow.