by shawn.blais

Flutter: Introducing `url_router` – A simpler Router controller.

When it comes to implementing a url-based Router (aka Nav2) there are really 2 high-level components to the API:

  • A controller to read/write to the current url
  • A parsing/matching system to convert a url into a stack of views, or pages.

The interesting thing here, is that the controller portion, is a fairly stable, boring API. Reading or writing the url location, or accessing queryParams is all pretty straight-forward. Really all you are doing here is setting a string value, and parsing query params using the URI class.

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by shawn.blais

Flutter: Introducing `RoutedWidgetSwitcher`

We’ve recently released a new package for use with all “Nav 2” implementations, called routed_widget_switcher: https://pub.dev/packages/routed_widget_switcher

It allows you to declaratively switch child widgets based on the current Router location:

class SideBar extends StatelessWidget {
    Widget build(_){
     return RoutedSwitcher(
        builders: (info) => [
            Routed('*', MainMenu.new),
            Routed('/dashboard', DashboardMenu.new),
            Routed('/settings', SettingsMenu.new),
        ]);
    }
}
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by shawn.blais

Flutter: Adding (scalable) state management to the new `skeleton` template

Recently we took a deep dive into the new skeleton template included in the Flutter SDK. As noted in the article, one of the big missing pieces in the template is a scalable state management solution with dependency injection and data-binding.

Given that, we thought it would be informative to convert it to use a couple of popular state management libraries, specifically riverpod and GetItMixin.

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by shawn.blais

Flutter: A Skeleton App w/ GetIt + GetItMixin

Recently we compared and contrasted some common state management packages. And while app architecture was not the focus of the article, we received some feedback that the examples were too simple to give a good picture of how the approaches would scale. In this post we’ll attempt to address that concern by building a simple yet scalable skeleton app using GetIt and GetItMixin!

Get What?

If you’re not familiar with GetIt, it is a robust implementation of the classic service locator pattern, which allows you to register objects by their type and then look them up from anywhere in the app. Recently it gained a sibling package named GetItMixin which provides reactive widget binding hooks. Combined these two packages make up one of the simplest and cleanest methods of managing state within a Flutter application. Let’s take a look!

NOTE: To follow along, the full demo is posted here:
https://github.com/esDotDev/flutter_experiments/tree/master/get_it_skeleton_app

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by shawn.blais

Flutter: Deep dive into the new `skeleton` app template

For many years Flutter has provided the basic “Counter App” each time you created a new project. While that example provides a nice introduction to the foundational concepts of StatefulWidget and basic font/asset management, it does not really resemble the structure of a “complete app”. This has left developers without guidance for anything beyond a basic single page app.

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