0-From ASP.NET to Flutter — The web coder path to Flutter
Change is never easy, in life or programming, we can’t fight it, we must adapt.
Because I could not know what I know today without everyone that helped me along the way, I want to try to help others, and I hope this will help give back to those that helped me. It will be rewarding if anyone can see something helpful out of experience.
I like to call this guide, “The web coder path to Flutter”, because it comes from me, mostly a web developer, who had to start doing native App Development for Mobile.
It began in 2010, I have always worked with a very small team of programmers, everything I learned was from them, or the internet.
Our team used mostly ASP.NET (C#), HTML, CSS, JavaScript and MS-SQL. All the needs we had to cover were easily filled by these, and still are. Web Forms can be powerful, as it can be limiting (no, I do not use MVC, for various reasons!).
First, Why Flutter?
· Very small team of developers
· One code base, multiple devices/OS (time saver, no need for multiple teams)
· Powered by Google
· Powered by a huge awesome community!
· Android is also from Google, Flutter is also used by Google, so who else would want this framework to be a success?
· Long-term solution (this is my opinion, yes it’s made by Google, but I don’t believe they will kill it anytime soon, the huge community makes this a viable solution).
· Great performance.
· Produces Native Apps.
· Made to work easily and directly with the hardware.
Maybe the best argument for not using Flutter, is that there are platforms that use languages that you could already know, and are more familiar, making the use of the framework easier. But… I don’t scare easily! Let’s learn something new!
The decision to use something completely new for me was not easy, and others might be against make this decision, but I believe, on the long-term, it will be more rewarding for me and our team to have learned Dart and Flutter.
Things that were hard to understand as a web coder when starting Flutter:
· There is no design view!
· Oh, and, no CSS!
· All code on the same file?! (Only for starters, you will learn to separate these!)
· It’s all about Widgets (TextBox, DropDownList, GridViews, Labels, etc etc.. it’s Widget)
· What is this “setState” you speak of? (I had a hard time adapting to the way data and vars are dealt with, it was very different from the web)
· API? (This might not be new for most, but there are some who go directly to the SQL, and never had to use API)
· JSONwho? (If you didn’t use API, you might not have dealt with JSON before, if the data you used was mostly from your local SQL)
I like to be honest, so I have to say this from the beginning, the transition will not be easy.
The transition WILL BE HARD!
Getting into Flutter and Dart for me was very hard, I struggled a lot for at least one month.
I got help from Flutter Portugal, without them I could not have made it this far. Flutter Portugal Organization and it’s community will always have my gratitude, for helping me and making me a part of it. This community is the main reason I love Flutter.
So… how to I start this?
I went to flutter.dev and just followed the Get started option!
I use visual studio code because it’s lighter on my machine (mostly 2012 hardware)
Now create the project.
https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/test-drive
What is the first thing I do? Delete everything and run it!
Don’t get me wrong, comments are good, but for someone that is starting and see’s all that green… is that Hulk? Go away!
This is still too much code for my first time, lets slim this down!
Ok, great, now I can get started!
What’s next?
This was my path.
This is not meant to be the “best way” or the “right way”, it’s “my way”, you might find value in it, or not, but every coder has its own way.
Since I’m a web developer, I go with what I’m used to, I’ve used SQL for a while now, so there isn't anything new there.
Next we will be getting some data to use! Oh wait… how do I get to the SQL?
