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Comment by pplante | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Flutter for a few months now, and have not felt this productive in years. Being able to iterate so quickly on real or virtual devices has changed how I design and development a UI. I can set out with a mock-up and almost immediately start to feel why it isn't perfect and just use it until the feel is right. The productivity bonuses are sometimes hard to explain to people who haven't yet tried Flutter and it's tooling.

This announcement of preview 1 is coming at a great time as I am launching my first app on iOS and Android next week.

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Dart is by far the most productive cross-platform web technology I've ever worked with. We got the same (quite complex due to the domain requirements) core codebase for web client, IOS, Android, and on the server side is well. Had we chosen to go with the more traditional combination, the effort to keep everything in sync would rise exponentially with the complexity of the project.

What frameworks are you using for the web client and the server?

Web client: our own mini-framework developed on top of dart:html (we needed maximum flexibility there, for simpler UI we could have used an existing framework)

Server: shelf

Now I wish dart had nullability support.

Cool - how is the WebView support?

I have a project that will require a WebView in the app.

Also I downloaded Flutter a while back and noticed a lot of buggy / unintuitive behavior with their TextViews (multi-line specifically) such as with copying and pasting, selecting text, etc.

Do you know whether these components have matured?

I found this: https://github.com/dart-flitter/flutter_webview_plugin

Looks rather hacky.

I've used this for pop-up dialogs. Works fine and I've had no issues on various sites which certainly have gross amounts of js. It shouldn't be long before the Flutter team provides a WebView widget.

I had some similar experiences with multiline text controls in the summer of last year, but it seemed to improve by around the fall. Not quite sure of the current state but it seemed to be improving.

(Overall it was still super worth it to use flutter at the time)

Sounds like Expo to me.

How does it handle native APIs? Like React-Native (you have to write bridges in ObjC/Java) or like NativeScript (you can simply access all native APIs via JS)

Asynchronous bridges

See this blog post from last year: https://hackernoon.com/whats-revolutionary-about-flutter-946...

The styles-as-widgets idea sounds nice.

I saw that with JSX somewhere <Row> <Column> <Grid> etc. Made the whole thing look much cleaner.

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