I have this project where I have to code a website and ios and android apps.
I have to do this with a very limited team (basically myself). So I want to share as much code between those platforms, to avoid maintaining different codebases as much as possible.
I have come to consider flutter : the logic (and interaction with the backend) in dart can be compiled to both ios and android, and to javascript for the web site to call. I also like how the UI is built using flutter.
For the web site, I know there is flutter web that can be used to do a web app, but I want my website to feel like a web site more than a single page app. I have thought about using React+Gatsby to do the website's ui, while calling the dart compiled js for the logic. That would enable high page loading speed, good seo, while keeping the interactivity of a react app and the single codebase logic through dart to js compilation.
I am wondering if this seems like a good approach to you, and if not, how you would do it.
In this approach, I am wondering if it would be possible to embedded flutter web widgets inside of react js components, always in a concern of maintaining as low platform specific code as possible. I have not found any other way of doing this than embedding them into iframes, which does not seem like a good idea, or does it ?
Update
Flutter Web is now available in a stable version for production.
Below answer is relevant back to the time when question was asked.
Flutter Web not recommended
At the current date, I would recommend not to use Flutter Web for production as it's in Beta. The Flutter Team is still working on improving quality, performance and browser compatibility. You must be cautious about using it as you may run into bugs and some other complications.
Also, I believe that the community support for Flutter Web might be on a lower side as it's pretty new.
Limited browser support
Another factor which bugs me is that the Flutter web apps can run on limited browsers as of now which would affect the reach to your user base:
Chrome (mobile & desktop)
Safari (mobile & desktop)
Edge (mobile & desktop)
Firefox (desktop)
What would I prefer?
Well, although it might be a hassle to handle different codebases for mobile and web platforms, I would still prefer to stick with React JS as it's much stable with better browser & community support as opposed to Flutter Web.
Good luck with your app! :)
I am unaware of how to use Flutter widgets inside a React app. But to address your other concerns,
So I want to share as much code between those platforms, to avoid maintaining different codebases as much as possible.
Given no other restrictions, this leads to a single Flutter app for both web and native. For a team as small as three we still found it easier than having multiple projects.
The key factor in merging our initial projects to one was the notion of mobile browsers. In a mobile browser you website should reduce itself to the look of your mobile app, unless they have different purposes. And this automatically happens with Flutter projects if you derive your layout breakpoints from screen size. Otherwise you would code your same narrow design twice: in Flutter for native apps and in React for web.
Same goes for native apps for tablets in landscape mode. They call for a layout that resembles your desktop browser version, and you automatically get it with Flutter.
Also in web version you may have more tools than in a native app, just because your screen allows it. Naturally, you would code this logic in JS. But then you get an order to migrate this to native apps. Would you then replace your JS logic with Dart logic compiled to JS and embedded into frames? This is a messy road.
Lastly, think of Mac, Linux and Windows platforms that will come to Flutter soon. Should you ever need a desktop native app, you would want the same layout as with web.
I want my website to feel like a web site more than a single page app.
The difference in feeling between a website and a single page app lies mostly in state management and URL handling. You may do the following to reduce it:
Introduce URLs for your pages. By default, in Flutter every piece of action can happen under a single URL of example.com/#/. The window then feels fragile as there is no URL to copy and get back to. Flutter's Router API, released in Oct 2020, allows you to generate URLs on any change in your app's state and parse the state back from URL. If you do it right, then everything on your screen becomes a function of the URL, just like in traditional websites.
Use url_stragegy package for your URLs to be example.com/path rather than example.com/#/path which immediately feels fake.
I have not found any other way of doing this than embedding them into iframes, which does not seem like a good idea, or does it ?
No, it does not. Mostly because you get too narrow a channel of communication of messages between JS windows. How would you listen to Flutter's BLoC's stream in another frame? It would take too much boilerplate code. Also I cannot think of easy debugging process.
To me, Flutter Web still has drawbacks:
It takes awhile to load.
Many specific JS APIs are not implemented yet.
Many services you integrate with may not have Dart SDK, while having JS SDK. For instance, I struggled to get Ably working.
No search engine optimization.
You cannot use em as a screen unit, so scaling elements may get tricky.
Still with limited resources a single codebase outweights everything else.
To be clear, my team has been working on a web+native project the whole 2021. It now has passed most of the testing, but not yet released. For a sense of scale, it is a marketplace of 40+ screens.
Related
I apologize in advance for how new I am to this all. I have a new business and there are some things I want to code for it myself as proof of concept till we have enough revenue to actually hire real coders.
Our ecosystem will have 4 major areas and I'm not sure if my approach is how to go about it or even possible.
The normal, static, info webpage that just talks about our business. (SEO and load times important)
A React JS / Next JS non-static section of that same website for blog and other dynamic content. (SEO and load times important)
A react JS employee backend for customer tracking and another tracking of customer data. (SEO and load times not as important here).
A customer portal where they can log in and see stats and stuff about their account (this will pull from data we enter in the employee backend and they can access to track progress) (I would eventually like android/ios apps as well as web portal for this so I was thinking using react-native / react-native web for this section to try and maximize code reuse. (SEO not important, but a smooth experience is)
I planed on using firebase to host it all. I'm curious if this seems it can work? Can you combine all of these different frameworks and strategies in one overall project like this without causing over bloat of download and such? Like for example, the employee backend will likely have a lot of packages and dependencies that the static front end would not require. And the static frontend would be in the same project as the dynamic blog but be built on different things (one static HTML, the other react with next.js? is that a bad idea?). Also, it's been hard to find info on exactly how goog react-native-web is so I'm just lost with this all and would love some guidance. Thank you so much in advance for any direction you can offer.
With firebase hosting you can host static sites, and redirect some paths, such as /api/* or /dynamic/* to firebase cloud functions.
On those cloud functions, you can do dynamic rendering, e.g. with remix.run or next.js.
If you use good cache-headers on those cloud functions, firebase hosting caches the results appropriately, making dynamic rendering of all pages feasible too.
I am little bit in confusion about this mechanism. Not sure this is the right way or platform to ask this, but might be I can get some idea at least.
I am working on a web app which has been already live for a long time. I have redesigned whole app with frontend technology of ReactJS and backed in spring boot. As the existing old web app (live web-app) is written in Spring MVC with bootstrap support and which is outdated. Now, we are done with the updated app code, and we are ready to make it live.
Is there any way to give user flexibility to use both web app at same time? Like existing web app which they are using and there will be one button or option from where they can able to get updated UI/UX. And the same thing If they are not feeling well with the new UI/UX they can switch back to old/existing web app.
It is little bit similar like Facebook did a time ago where they give option to "Switch back to classic".
For now, I have one idea in mind to give this support based on subdomain, but not sure is that a good way or technical feasible or not.
I have an angular app currently in Electron. (It was built by someone else) I would like to run this in my browser (possibly converting it to a Progressive Web App). Is this possible? If so how?
A short summary from some of my own experience doing something similar. In my case it was possible but this might not always be true. Hope this helps.
Find and assess the app's dependencies on the Electron api - try searching for require('electron') or more likely in Angular, ngxElectron or another Angular Electron api wrapper, fixing or changing the app so that it no longer depends on Electron.
Do a search for Electron API keywords and usages and decide how to handle them. Examples where the app might use Electron - the Electron menu, clipboard, BrowserView, or more behind-the-scenes the app might use IPC.
The app might reference the Node api since Node is relatively easy to mix in to your app in Electron, and this will be a problem that needs to be fixed. Search for Node api references.
Some apps have native dependencies outside of Electron, you'll need to find any such API's and decide how to handle them.
The size of work (and even if it's possible at all) will depend on the functionality the app itself provides and the extent of native features required, the extent of dependency on Electron features, dependencies on Node.
For example, within Electron, developers have more control over the browser than usual, and can choose to switch off normal web security features. Cross site scripting (CORS, etc) or other security issues might crop up when you move the app to the browser. Take a look at the options passed when BrowserWindows are created. If the app has exotic settings these might necessitate architecture changes.
You need to decide whether the app still needs to work in Electron after porting (this might be possible but can make things complicated)
If the app should still run in Electron, you'll need to decide a strategy for how to handle this (for example, if statements checking for Electron, or another strategy).
I've been thinking of creating an hybrid app. I worked with ionic before, but i don't have any clue about react.
What i exactly needed is 'code once run anywhere' approach. The angular 2 is doing great in that i can write code for web app, android , apple devices and even windows.
I want to know whether i can do this in React. Can I create an app with react which runs on both web and mobile app as platform independent.
Thanks in advance!
Angular 2 and React are great frameworks/library(for react) which can run almost anywhere. In fact lets first determine what we mean with anywhere.
Angular 2 can server that app on web and if you are using a responsive format can serve mobile devices as well really fast. On devices you can serve it with ionic but the catch here is that this will be served with webviews which is actually a small placement inside the app to show html content. This rendering is rubbish if you want to serve native experience to the user. If not, then great ! Also you can have windows phones as well.
React on the other hand is easy to go in to code fast. I recommend using redux (which might take a while to get used to). Also with responsive design can serve many web devices really fast. Now on the smartphones the experience is native. Yes exactly native ! So if you plan the application correctly and split the logic right you can serve from the same app both application web + mobile. For windows phones now there is a limitation.
For desktops you can use electron as well and have it all!
I guess for me you must consider what your target is (time, devices, experience) and then decide.
Have fun!
I work on a team that supports a mobile web site. It's a typical web app in that it's pages of forms that submit and retrieve data from a server. Back end currently JSF.
It's working fine but there's a strong want to start leveraging more of the native device's components and features (namely messaging/alerts and UI widgets). Given the number of platforms we're trying to support (iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian [yuck] and potentially Windows 7) PhoneGap seems to be the first thing I should spend some time looking at.
I think I have a good grasp on how it works (broadly speaking) in that it allows you to use HTML CSS and JS then builds a native app that 'wraps' around your code and offers up a JS API into the device's native widgets and features as needed.
What I'm not so clear on is how one would use it in a client/server type of interaction. Could we use PhoneGap to create a front end UI that would still talk live to our servers? If so, could we leverage standard AJAX/JSON/XML type technologies to send and receive the data or are there hidden hurdles I'm not aware of in doing that with a solution like PhoneGap? In otherwords, does the webview within the PhoneGap app work just as WebKit would in that we can make an AJAX call, get some data, and update the DOM?
Or is there a different type of framework I should be looking at?
A example summary explanation of what we're looking for would be: We'd like our current web application to be able to launch a native date picker on the device and receive alerts but still interact with our servers as our current mobile web site does.
As user731077 says, yes, PhoneGap can do all of that. There's a number of potential methods you could use to do so in the Javascript code of your PhoneGap app. Here's a few to check out.
XMLHttpRequest object, but I'd suggest one of the below choices that handles cross browser inconsistencies
jQuery ajax()
xui.js xhr() (my choice)
zepto.js ajax()
xui.js and zepto.js are my suggestions as they are basically stripped down versions of jQuery optimized for mobile web development. I'm partial to xui.js because its the framework commonly used by the PhoneGap guys themselves.
your every question has a YES answer :)