If you’re a small startup, just like we are doing at ours [1], you want to share as much code as possible between your web and mobile apps, and also backend, so sadly due to Dart, I don’t see us anywhere in the future using Flutter.
> you want to share as much code as possible between your web and mobile apps, and also backend
I've worked on 3 start-ups and 3 major, large companies. So far every single one of them tried to do the whole share code everywhere thing and every single time it ultimately cost us far, far more time to get everything working and then subsequently testing re-used code.
I've worked two projects where we used different components and code, for 99% of everything, across server, mobile and native and we were able to work _significantly_ faster.
So I'm curious, would you work towards sharing code again if you had to start from scratch? Has it ended up being worth it? Because my personal experience so far has seen it usually be more of a liability than anything else so I'd love to know how it worked out for others.
What are you using for web? We're using react, and are planning to move to react-native-web for better web + mobile code sharing, and for Catalyst for having a native macOS app — not sure also if Flutter will work for that.
But it's key for us, since we started with JS, to stay in JS due to the knowledge out there and within our team — already. It, of course, depends on your team and in your hiring options.
I feel Flutter/Dart is still too immature to be deployed all across the stack. Maybe if you're today starting from scratch it would be doable, like it is for you. Mind sharing your landing page? I'm interested in seeing your product.
I built a web prototype in Flutter. I started in May and was using a web specific branch then Flutter's master branch. Doesn't run well (and I haven't optimized anything) but I am on stable now and its getting better.
Dart on the web frontend too, since start of the project. If you already had a substantial part of the project in JS, then Typescript would prob be better choice.
Dart is pretty mature at this point, with a very solid type system and getting better with extension methods just added and NNBD coming soon. It doesn't have as many packages, but it's pretty good.
> native macOS app — not sure also if Flutter will work for that.
They're working on flutter for desktop and there's a prototype.
To me "not enough packages" out there means it's an instant competitive disadvantage to do production-ready apps, at least for Web — which at for us at Standups is a critical platform, especially given we're B2B.
Hopefully, it catches up soon though, as I do think Flutter is better than React Native in most fronts.
Can you really straight up share components between react and react-native? Most of the RN components kinda map to mobile stuff--they're called things like View and TextInput. Most of what I see in React are divs with different stylings.
Moreover, can you share any code at all between node.js and react/RN?
We did that in one of our projects using react-native-web https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web which basically allows you to write your web code within the react native project so everything is shared between web and mobile including the same views which are exported for the web with proper styling as mobile. Plus it allows you to override any components for your web using .web.js just as .ios.js and .android.js extentions.
Funny how this got many upvotes and then lots of downvotes through the hours.
I state again here: full stack Flutter is not ready for prime time. It needs more time to mature, and for small product startups I will not recommend it, not even if you’re starting from scratch.
[1] https://standups.io