This week in Flutter #23: Status of Flutter for web and server-side Dart in production

Is Flutter ready for web apps? Is Dart ready for backend code? Find out in this issue who is using both in a production app and what they think about them.

- Michele Volpato

Development 🧑‍💻

🔗 Building a production ready Flutter Web App

Many people claim that Flutter for web is not good enough for a production web app. While I agree to some degree, I also know that with the right project and the right team, a performing and engaging Flutter web app can be made. This is exactly what the guys at Dropzone did. Read from the founder Matias Meno about their experience with Flutter for web in production.

🔗 How to use google_ml_kit package in flutter for text recognition

You’ve already read about Firebase ML in a previous issue of this newsletter. But how do you use Google ML in your Flutter app? Read this article, by Aaqil Shihab.

🔗 Flutter web app for newsletter sign up using Firebase functions)

Neha M published a tutorial about using Flutter for web and Firebase to create a newsletter signup form. It is a simple tutorial but it has everything you need to learn how to combine the two technologies.

🔗 Explore BlockSemantics In Flutter

Most apps you write should have accessibility in mind. All users should be able to experience your app regardless of their disabilities. One way to ensure that is by using semantics for the widgets that compose your app. Shaiq khan shows you how to use BlockSemantics to hide widgets from accessibility tools so that when a dialog is shown, the accessibility tool is not able to interact with widgets behind it.

🔗 Building a 2D game with Flutter

Learn how to create a simple version of the Pong game in Flutter, with this tutorial by Chinedu Imoh.

🔗 Flutter TextField validation made easy with TextEditingController and AnimatedBuilder

You don’t need a Form, a TextFormField, and a GlobalKey to show an error and enable/disable a button on the validation of a text field. You can use TextEditingController, as Andrea Bizzotto did in this article.

🔗 Animation In Flutter: Animation Class, Tween & CurvedAnimation

Learn more about animations in this article by Dhruv Nakum.

🔗 Flutter styling explained in CSS

I am not an expert in HTML and CSS, but this way of explaining Flutter layout and UI styling by Manolo Edge can be very helpful to those who are learning Flutter and has a CSS background.

Design 🧑‍🎨

🔗 Demystifying application alerts and why you should build your own Alert component

Quan Nguyen talks about alerts in Flutter, what they are, and how to use them. This is just an overview of the concept, no code, just theory you should know before designing/implementing them.

🔗 Supernova: a design system platform

Mariam Hasnany from the Flutter team publishes an interview with Supernova’s CEO Jiří Třečák and CTO Artem Ufimtcev about their design system platform built with and for Flutter. I find interesting their opinion about the CanvasKit renderer.

Tools 🛠

🔗 How to Safely Build Assigned Flutter App with GitHub Actions

A couple of weeks ago I linked an article about automated unit testing with GitHub actions. This article, by Wendreo Fernandes, provides a more complete explanation.

Backend 🗄

🔗 Writing server side Dart code

Are you interest in server-side Dart? I am. In the past, I looked into server-side Swift, but at the time there was no async/await. The next time I need to write some simple server code, I will certainly look into Dart. At Dropzone they not only used Flutter for the frontend application (see the first link in this newsletter) they also used Dart for the backend part. Matias Meno shares the experience they had with server-side Dart.

That’s it for this week.

If you want to comment on any of this week’s entries, you can do it in the comment section below.

Have a bug-free week,

- Michele Volpato