I’m playing around with Meteor and Flutter.
Watch in this video.
I’m still deciding if we are going to build a full app for Lemeno (Lemeno: The RSS reader for social media) in Flutter but it’s nice to use Flutter and Meteor together. The way to declare Widgets is kinda weird, React has a better Component model IMO but I think I can get used to it.
This is the Flutter integration that I’m using dart_meteor | Dart Package, I don’t think it is working perfectly (for example it’s not restoring the user session automatically AFAIK) but if more people start to use we could improve it together, the maintainer is opened to contributions. It also needs to have a Websocket implementation compatible with Flutter Web.
Anyway, I’m just starting with Flutter.
If you want to know more let me know, so I can create content with Flutter and Meteor for CodeFTW soon.
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What would be the benefit of using flutter instead of cordova or react native? I can only see one if you already have a flutter app and want to integrate it with meteor.
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Great initiative @filipenevola I’m interested to see what’s happening/lend a hand.
@gabrielnbds Flutter is supposed to be more native than React Native, so has some performance advantages, and can now do desktop apps too, and evidently better than Electron (smaller and faster).
It’s just not JS, and not React
The two main differences IMO:
- React Native is based on JavaScript and uses JSX. However, Flutter uses Dart programming language.
- Dart IMO is a language with the potential to be huge as it supports out-of-the-box Ahead of time compilation and Just in time compilation, in other words: fast in production and fast in development (hot reload).
- The architecture for both frameworks differs. Flutter uses a 2D graphic rendering library, Skia, whereas, React Native uses the Flux architecture, which also requires JavaScript bridging
- They are now replacing Skia with Impeller
Copied the topics from this article if you want to read more.
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Since there is React Native Skia I don’t see performance being an advantage for mobile. However using it for desktop apps instead of electron is one.
For me one of the best things of meteor is using only one language for client and server but I can’t see supporting a different language as a bad thing especially when there’s some big players using it.
For sure Meteor and JS all the way is more productive.
I’m playing around with Flutter as for some clients a killer App is sometimes important.
But let’s see. I’ll keep sharing my learnings and if I go to production with this app I’ll be able to share results as well.
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Hi!
We are close to release our second app with Flutter and Meteor, so far so good, with the module dart_meteor: ^3.0.0., yea, it is true that some functionalities like restore session must be implemented by hand, nevertheless subscriptions and methods works well.
Carlos.
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Hi there! As Filipe said before, I am welcome any improvement to the package. I am very happy to see that the dart_meteor is helpful to the ecosystem. Currently, I have a couple of Flutter+Meteor APPs in the production. FYI, thanks to the latest PR, we now have the web support in the version 4.0.0-beta.2.
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Hi Filipe 
I also built a small app for a client a couple of years ago and had good results, but it was only used by a handful of users at the time so I’m not sure how it would perform in production. I’m now in the position of doing it for an internal product so I’m weighing my options.
Did you end up moving forward with dart_meteor for your app? Any big pitfalls that you discovered along the way? Thanks!
@carlosolivera Your story is very encouraging! Things are running smoothly with the second app, I hope.
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