With the recent move to Dart 3, many applications out there are upgrading to take advantage of null safety. Null safety IS awesome, but what isn’t awesome is the plethora of packages out there in Pub that don’t yet support these breaking changes. Why is this an issue? Because most Flutter apps built out there (particularly ones built by low-code tools) have tons of dependencies. Odds are one of these will break when performing a major upgrade like this.
What I’ve been working on I’ve been working lately on a new Flutter app for mom-and-pop fast casual restaurants. The idea was brought to me when I was too early for a Bible study in the morning and the manager spoke with me about his app idea. Once he found out I was a software engineer, he could not resist the temptation to tell me about his app idea, but he’s only human!
Flutter Repository Pattern The Repository pattern is a simple one, you use a Repository to abstract away the implementation details of how to store and retrieve data. With Flutter, it can be complicated (especially when using Firestore) to implement the Repository pattern in a repeatable, testable way. I have heard from friends and other budding Flutter developers that testing with Firebase is a problem. Not so if you follow some well-known design patterns out there.
Author’s note: If you like this post, consider supporting at patreon.com/windlejacob12. I love writing, and sharing what I’ve learned. I’d love to spend the majority of my time doing it! I’ve been working on a contact lately with a local startup in Johnson City, to implement infinite scrolling in their application. The codebase is entirely generated via FlutterFlow, and being generated by a low-code tool it’s a ball of spaghetti.
The long-running Isolate is a technique that I have used now in my contracting to run extensive processes in the background of a Flutter app. Running background code came up as a need while working with a local startup FytFeed in order to power some on-device integrations. I wrote code that detected the availbility of information in HealthKit and shipped those updates off all while being separate from the main isolate to avoid any UI jank and keep the interface responsive and clean.
Over the last few months, I have been working on a side project that I intend to launch this coming fall. I’ve been working on a mobile app that will provide users with a new form of social networking. The choice I had to make was whether or not I should use a cross-platform framework. 3 choices stood out to me, React Native, Flutter, and Nativescript. All of these choices have their pros and cons, but what I eventually chose was Flutter.