Flutter share native objects between plugins - flutter

I am working on a couple plugins for streaming and recording video. In Android land it is generally not possible to have two things access the camera simultaneously.
The obvious solution is to merge the two plugins into one that marshals/shares the resource.
This got me thinking. Is there any way to share native objects between plugins? I cannot find any documentation or resources on this.
Does anyone have a suggestion on how to achieve this?

I've been doing similar stuff - not with video but with raw data, and it is possible. There are two major approaches:
Share data between the packages via flutter medium - method + event channels with the proper implementation in all plugins.
Since you would have to implement a lot of boilerplate either way in both ios and android platforms, you as well may implement all the sharing directly in the native code. After all, you have access to all the plugins' native code in the native part of your flutter app. Just channel the data there correctly without including flutter at all(well, not at all - in the end, some trigger methods/events should exist either way).
I went down the second path, and it was not that hard to do. I'm not sure about your use case, but sharing the video stream between several end recipients is possible, so it should also be possible in the flutter app.

Related

What has been your experience of building a browser website using Flutter?

We've built an app through Flutter and realising that some of our user behaviour is best created for larger screens, where people are creating best on desktop. I've seen that the codebase is viable for transporting to a web experience. We want to avoid the desktop app and build for a browser.
Has anyone had experience with building for web browsers using Flutter?
What's been your experience? How good is the codebase for creating things such as:
Messengers
Posting and threads
Spaces, like Pinterest folders or Padlet like these - NewHope Crowdsource Space
This is the app on the store if that helps.
I'd greatly appreciate any feedback, thoughts or experiences you've had. I'm wondering whether to invest in Flutter for web browser or whether I need to go back to JS.
Thank you
We're exploring whether to develop the website through a different language and looking for people's experiences if they've attempted this.
The experience is not much different than mobile development, if you're used to it, really I recommend you usage this variant. Only one source code for all platforms.
In addition, the use of libraries is practically the same. The only thing that changes is that it compiles to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
I only recommend taking care of the adaptability to different screen sizes, using mediaQuery (height, width) and Expanded Widgets.
The rest stays the same, your HTTP requests (Dio is an excellent option). To work the logic layer also the BLoC design pattern helps a lot.

data persistence on remote server

I'm trying to understand some basic things. I'm a php programmer and I'm interested in flutter. If anyone can answer, I would really appreciate it...
I use mysql in my projects, which are on hostgator. I heard that sqlite is only for local storage and in my case the entire web project will be hosted on the remote server. Can I use sqlite to save my customers' data? Or is there something native better? A big concern of mine!
Is flutter mature enough for robust commercial applications?
Does the documentation indicate when something applies to an earlier version? Or is the information all mixed up and it's up to the programmer to identify when something is only valid for versions prior to flutter 3?
thank you for any guidance
You can use Sqlite, but I would recommend Firestore/Firebase for stuff like that. It's very easy to implement it and they have great solutions for many thigs.
Yes it is! Many commercial applications are running on flutter now. For example the Google Ads app is built with flutter.
I don't really know for sure, but I know that the one time I had a problem with it, it was declared.
I'd prefer saving user's data on the cloud. I personally like Google's firebase which helps with authentication and storage using RealTime Database. It's pretty easy to sync your user's data into the DB and even stores data using cache in case the user is offline and syncs to DB once device is online. You can find more about firebase and their products here.
Flutter is a really great framework to get your apps done for multiple platforms at once, thanks to its cross platform compatibility! If you don't want to spend time creating app for multiple devices, flutter's the way to go. I personally think flutter web is yet to grow, but it will overtime, afterall, it's opensource framework by Google. I'd suggest this idea 8.5/10
Flutter docs are pretty well written and an beginner could get through it with some video examples (included in documentation) as well. In case something you want to use isn't supported in newer version of flutter, the text editor will show a line over the code meaning that it is deprecated and wouldn't be supported. There's always an alternative, which you could find using flutter docs or YouTube. Flutter docs are optimised for beginners 9/10
Ad 1. There is pub.dev- the official package repository for Dart and Flutter. You can find many interesting packages there. They give you possibilities that the native Flutter doesn't give.
For example mysql1- driver for MySQL and MariaDB.

Design patterns & Clean architecture in flutter

When I start programming a new application in flutter everything goes well at the beginning but when the project grows up it starts to become messy, and then I decide to delete the project to start over.
I searched about the clean architecture and design patterns but I found a lot of choices such as DDD, BLoC, and so many patterns and architectures, I didn't what is the best thing to stick with every time I enter a research process that lasts forever.
So I want to hear from you as professionals and expert coders what is the best thing to stick with and what should I do? please give some advice on how to deal with big projects in flutter?
Thank you very much
Firstly the Flutter project architecture is very subjective because it depends on your needs.
But we can find some general principles:
Use a router system : By default flutter provide a Navigator API to let you navigate through your app. But there is no real structure and when you want to use push notifications to redirect the user to your App you will be stuck.
GoRouter package delivers a very nice router system, and Google teams are thinking about implementing it into the Flutter SDK.
Take advantage of a StateManagement library : When your application will become bigger you will want to handle the state of the app more precisely. So you will be able to refresh and update the content of pages easily and without reloading the content. To do that there are a lot of packages :
BLoC
Provider
Cubit
GetX
Handle the data (like API JSON Response, or SQLite Query). A huge part of a clean architecture is the way you manage the data. If you use an API you have to deal with JSON Serialization. In a small app you can do your own system to deserialize data, but you have to implement a lot of boilerplate code. I recommend to use build_runner and json_serializable packages. This stack of plugins lets you build your data classes easily without worrying about the serialization : BuildRunner will generate this code for you.
Use a structured folder system. Personally I used the DDD pattern, because you can easily separate your data from the logic of your app, this improves your maintainability.
Schema of a Flutter Clean Architecture with DDD
I hope this will help you to develop your own architecture. To wrap up, here are some helpful resources on this topic.
https://devmuaz.medium.com/flutter-clean-architecture-series-part-1-d2d4c2e75c47
https://docs.flutter.dev/development/data-and-backend/json
https://codewithandrea.com/articles/flutter-project-structure/
It's a good idea to choose layer-first or feature-first approach for your project as step one. Mentioned link to Andrea's article is a great one - https://codewithandrea.com/articles/flutter-project-structure/
Then you choose whether you want to use Riverpod with providers or blocs and/or cubits. You can write an app with all of them, so I would recommend to try them first and then make a choice. For example, I wrote a Flutter app using cubits only.
Next, you can choose routing library, to make life easier with navigating to/from screens, deep linking etc. Either auto_route or go_router is good.
Also, make use of libraries for json serialization, data classes, injectables, as they save you from lots of boilerplate code.

How to achieve single page app with multiple views in Dart?

I am migrating from GWT to Dart and would like to take the MVP pattern that I learned from building GWT apps and use them in Dart-land. I'm playing around with my first Dart app and would like it to be a "single-page" app, meaning that the view can change at the drop of a hat without forcing the user to suffer a page load. GWT solves this (in part) with it's Activities & Places API, and I'm wondering if Dart has anything similar.
What does Dart offer developers in the way of creating single-page apps, and if it doesn't, how do other Dart developers achieve single-page apps?
GWT uses codesplitting and fragmentation to minimize the amount of time the application takes to load. Does Dart offer anything like this, or can it be "hacked" to emulate these concepts?
1) Depending on frameworks there are different ways to do that. For instance angular.dart can handle views and routing. An other solution is the route package.
2) See Mulitple JavaScript files in Dart?
1) Using Polymer elements as views works fine too.

building an app to cater for WP7,Iphone & Android

I am about to start building an app that will be used across all platforms. I will using monotouch and monodriod so I can keep things in .net
I'm a little lazy so I want to be able to reuse as much code as possible.
Lets say I want to create an application that stores contact information. e.g. Name & Phone number
My application needs to be able to retrieve data from a web service and also store data locally.
The MVVM pattern looks like the way to go but im not sure my approach below is 100% correct
Is this correct?
A project that contains my models
A project that contains my views,local storage methods and also view models which I bind my views to. In this case there would be 3 different projects based on the 3 os's
A data access layer project that is used for binding to services and local data storage
Any suggestions would be great.
Thanks for your time
Not specifically answering your question, but here are some lazy pointers...
you can definitely reuse a lot of code across all 3 platforms (plus MonoWebOS?!)
reusing the code is pretty easy, but you'll need to maintain separate project files for every library on each platform (this can be a chore)
MVVM certainly works for WP7. It's not quite as well catered for in MonoTouch and MonoDroid
some of the main areas you'll need to code separately for each device are:
UI abstractions - each platform has their own idea of "tabs", "lists", "toasts", etc
network operations - the System.Net capabilities are slightly different on each
file IO
multitasking capabilities
device interaction (e.g. location, making calls etc)
interface abstraction and IoC (Ninject?) could help with all of these
The same unit tests should be able to run all 3 platforms?
Update - I can't believe I just stumbled across my own answer... :) In addition to this answer, you might want to look at MonoCross and MvvmCross - and no doubt plenty of other hybrid platforms on the way:
https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross
http://monocross.net (MVC Rather then Mvvm)
Jonas Follesoe's cross platform development talk: Has to be the most comprehensive resource out there at the moment. He talks about how best to share code and resources, abstract out much of the UI and UX differences, shows viable reusable usage of MVVM across platforms and nice techniques for putting together an almost automated build. (yes, that includes a way for you to compile you monotouch stuff on Visual Studio)
Best of all he has a available source code for the finished product and for a number of the major component individually placed in its own workshop project and a 50 + page pdf detailing the steps to do so.FlightsNorway on github
IMO the only thing missing is how best to handle local data storage across all platforms. In which case I would direct you to Vici Cool Storage an ORM that can work with WP7, MonoTouch and (while not officially supported) MonoDroid.
*Disclaimer* The site documentation isn't the most updated but the source code is available. (Because documentation is Kriptonite to many a programmer)
I think the easiest way to write the code once and have it work on all three platforms will probably be a web-based application. Check out Untappd for example.
You can start by looking at Robert Kozak's MonoTouch MVVM framework. It's just a start though.
MonoTouch MVVM