Flutter, DI with Koin/Dagger and Modularization at PADC #3
The Philippine Android Developers Community or PADC held their 3rd meetup at Freelancer HQ, Ecotower, Bonifacio Global City last April 24, 2019. With approximately 50 attendees, the event featured the topics Mobile Development with Flutter, Dependency Injection with Koin / Dagger and Modularizing your Android Project.
Mobile Development with Flutter
The rise of cross-platform mobile development has been popular because it allows you to reuse your code and allows developers to work on a single codebase because it supports your app in more than one platform. Examples of these are React Native, NativeScript, Xamarin and for this meetup’s topic, Flutter.
This framework is still young, having its first release in May 2017. It is open-sourced by Google and written in the Dart programming language, and was created to mainly support Google’s Fuchsia operating system.
The first speaker is Joshua De Guzman, a mobile developer at Freelancer, the meetup’s host. He started out his presentation by comparing Flutter with other cross-platform frameworks React Native and NativeScript. And for him, he found Flutter to be easier and faster in terms of knowledge curve and compilation.
On GitHub, Flutter boasts 300+ contributors and 60,000+ stars, and has four major features:
- Beautiful UI
- Rich in UI components
- Uses Material UI (Android)
- Uses Cupertino (iOS)
- Highly customizable
2. Native Performance
- Powered by SKIA Engine (Graphics)
- Hardware accelerated graphics (supported by default)
- Native Experience
- Compiled
3. Fast development
- Improved work productivity
- Stateful Hot Reload
- Iterate apps on real-time
4. Open-Source
His presentation concluded with a demo of an app he created called Movie Hub. It retrieves movies from the TheMovieDB API using BLoC Pattern. View his project on GitHub here.
Dependency Injection with Koin / Dagger
Our next speaker is Miguel Fermin, an Android Developer at White Cloak Technologies. Koin is a lightweight DI for Kotlin while Dagger is a DI framework for Java and Android.
He compared the differences of both and held an interactive discussion from the audience about their thoughts of each. In the end, people recommended Koin over Dagger.
Modularizing Your Android Project
Our last speaker is Kurt Renzo Acosta, an Android Developer at STORM Technologies.
Modularization is separating your code into more independent modules.
Why should you modularize your app?
- For compile / build times
- Single responsibility principle
- Easier debugging
The next PADC meetup is on June 15, 2019, 12:30pm at W Global Center, Bonifacio Global City. This is a joint meetup by PADC and Kotlin and is hosted by Mynt, a financial technology startup.
RSVP now to reserve your seat! They are still looking for speakers, so if you’re interested, be sure to fill out their form!
