A New Hope

"A New Hope" a talk about Flutter by Eugenio Marletti & Stebastiano Poggi

Video DroidconIT 2017: https://youtu.be/0ijVuVtu6a4

In this day and age, the Android UI is getting more and more features. Which is amazing. But they get layered on top of years of TODOs, less-than-clean code, and quick patches. This means the APIs are not as terse as us devs would like, and there’s plenty of unwritten knowledge to have to make things work. What if there was something that took the best bits of the Android UI model and wrapped that in a modern, sensible codebase?

Turns out, there is. It’s part of a “native cross-platform” framework, Flutter, that is being developed in Google and used in some of their products. While still a long way from stable and feature-complete, Flutter has an interesting approach of including a full framework based off of Dart. It’s modeled on the good bits of the Android UI framework and will allow your code to run consistently across devices, without the weird BSP- or vendor-specific issues we unfortunately got used to.

Transcript

1. A NEW HOPE Sebastiano Poggi Android GDE, Novoda Eugenio Marletti Android GDE, Clue
3. SDK for building high-performance, high-fidelity, apps for iOS and Android, from a single codebase
4. TECH PREVIEW
5. flapping wings quickly and lightly rapid variation of signal parameters a small bet
6. QUIZ TIME!
7. QUIZ TIME!
12. Open-source language Made by (and for) Google “Familiar” Java-like syntax More modern than Java
13. Dynamic language Statically checked (strong mode) Mixins, reified generics, async (streams!) const constructs Snapshots (serialisation) Runs in Dart VM, JS or AOT native
14. FRAMEWORK ENGINE
15. C++ FRAMEWORK ENGINE
16. FRAMEWORK ENGINE C++ TEXT (BLINK) SKIA
17. FRAMEWORK WIDGETS RENDERING DART:UI DART CUPERTINO MATERIAL ENGINE C++ TEXT (BLINK) SKIA
18. WIDGETS WIDGETS WIDGETS WIDGETS WIDGETS WIDGETS EVERYWHERE WIDGETS EVERYWHERE WIDGETS EVERYWHERE WIDGETS EVERYWHERE WIDGETS EVERYWHERE
19. Composition over inheritance Everything is a widget Declaration and binding together
21. Stateless Stateful
22. Stateless class BoringText extends StatelessWidget { @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { return new Text("Hello world") } }
23. Stateful class Counter extends StatefulWidget { @override _CounterState createState() => new _CounterState(); }
24. Stateful class _CounterState extends State<Counter> { int _counter = 0; void _increment() { setState(() { ++_counter; }); } @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { return new Text("Count: " + _counter); } }
25. Animations
28. Unit tests Instrumentation tests Widget tests
29. Smoooth (60 fps) Performance? Smoooth (60 fps)
30. Full control No OEM customisation Always up to date Inspect real source code which will be run Minimal Apk size: 8MB
31. Development experience
32. $ flutter doctor [✓] Flutter (on Mac OS X 10.12.4 16E195, channel unknown) • Flutter at /Users/takhion/flutter • Framework revision 031e042eee (3 weeks ago), 2017-03-17 15:24:54 • Engine revision c4edec7417 • Tools Dart version 1.23.0-dev.9.0 [✓] Host Executable Compatibility • Downloaded executables execute on host [✓] Android toolchain - develop for Android devices (Android SDK 25.0.2) • Android SDK at /Users/takhion/Android/sdk • Platform android-25, build-tools 25.0.2 • ANDROID_HOME = /Users/takhion/Android/sdk • Java binary at: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_25.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java • Java version: Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_25-b17) [✓] iOS toolchain - develop for iOS devices (Xcode 8.2.1) • Xcode at /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer • Xcode 8.2.1, Build version 8C1002 • ios-deploy 1.9.1 • CocoaPods version 1.2.0 [✓] Android Studio (version 2.2) • Android Studio at /Applications/Android Studio.app/Contents • Gradle version 2.14.1 [✓] Connected devices • Pixel • FA69N0309825 • android-arm • Android 7.1.1 (API 25)
33. Full control
34. $ flutter run Launching lib/main.dart on Pixel in debug mode... Running 'gradle assembleDebug'... Built build/app/outputs/apk/app-debug.apk (21.8MB). Uninstalling old version... Installing build/app/outputs/apk/app.apk... 6.0s Syncing files to device... 2.8s ! To hot reload your app on the fly, press "r". To restart the app entirely, press "R". The Observatory debugger and profiler is available at: http://127.0.0.1:8106/ For a more detailed help message, press "h". To quit, press "q".
38. Full control
39. Full control
40. API 16+ ARM only iOS 8+ 64 bit (iPhone 5S+)
43. Eric Seidel Adam Barth Ian Hickson
44. flutter.io github.com/rock3r/squanchy-flutter bit.ly/a-new-hope-flutter
45. Eugenio Marletti @workingkills @seebrock3r Sebastiano Poggi