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Why Choose Flutter for Web Development?

Is Flutter the Right Choice for Web Development Projects?

Thank you comment icon Hi Jones, From personal experience, Flutter is currently not a good framework for web. Navigation (back button, refresh button) are really bugged because state isn't saved when page needs to reload. Flutter also compiles into a canvas-like screen, meaning that you can't select text like you can on HTML and other common web frameworks, as well as a lot of other things that are usually on a website and users are used to, leading to a poor user experience. I learned Flutter thinking it would be the only front-end I would have to learn, but I learned Flutter has limitations in both app and especially web. I would have learned React if I could start over. *idk where to post an answer so I'm leaving a comment instead Lucas

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Subject: Career question for you

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Daria’s Answer

Flutter is primarily known as a framework for building cross-platform mobile applications. However, Flutter also offers the capability to build web applications using the same codebase. While Flutter for web has made significant progress, it's important to consider several factors when deciding if Flutter is the right choice for web development projects:

1. Code Sharing: Flutter allows you to write code once and use it across multiple platforms, including web, iOS, Android, and desktop. If you already have a Flutter codebase for mobile apps and want to reuse that code for web development, Flutter can be a good choice as it promotes code sharing and reduces development efforts.

2. UI/UX: Flutter provides a rich set of customizable widgets and a reactive framework, which allows you to create visually appealing and highly interactive applications. If you prioritize creating a consistent and aesthetically pleasing UI/UX across different platforms, Flutter can be a good fit for web development.

3. Performance: Flutter is known for its excellent performance, thanks to its high-performance rendering engine and direct access to native platform APIs. While Flutter for web has improved, it may not match the performance of pure web technologies like JavaScript frameworks (e.g., React, Angular, Vue.js) that are optimized for web development.

4. Ecosystem and Libraries: Flutter has a growing ecosystem with various packages and libraries available for different purposes. However, the web-specific packages might be limited compared to the mature ecosystems of JavaScript frameworks. Before choosing Flutter for web development, ensure that the required libraries and packages are available to meet your project's needs.

5. Web-specific Features: Flutter for web is still evolving, and certain web-specific features and optimizations may not be as mature as those provided by traditional web frameworks. If your project heavily relies on specific web functionalities or requires deep integration with web technologies (e.g., SEO, server-side rendering), it's worth considering the limitations and potential trade-offs of using Flutter for web.

6. Development Team Skills: Consider the skills and expertise of your development team. If your team is already familiar with Dart (the programming language used in Flutter) or has experience with Flutter for mobile development, leveraging the same knowledge for web development can be advantageous.

Ultimately, the decision to use Flutter for web development depends on your project requirements, priorities, and the trade-offs you are willing to make. Flutter can be a suitable choice for web development projects that prioritize code sharing, UI/UX consistency, and have a team experienced in Flutter. However, if your project heavily relies on web-specific features or requires extensive web optimization, you may find more benefits in using traditional web frameworks.
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Fred’s Answer

This question is tough to answer. Can you provide some more details?

Any software platform is a tool. It's going to do some things well (we hope), and other things poorly. Just like a hammer is great for driving a nail, but can't cut a board cleanly.

If you are going to do some kind of web development, you should start by gathering requirements. Figure out what the project has to do, what components are needed, any user requirements, etc. Once you know all that, THEN you start looking at what platforms are available and which meets your needs the best.
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Martin’s Answer

Great question! :)

Agree with previous answers that there is a lot of paths to go, depending on what you want to achieve.
I would recommend you to think what is your goal and try to go for most popular frameworks in this area, but for sure there is no framework which you will use forever, so just keep awareness about other frameworks - at least some basic like how they work, pros/cons, etc.. Each company is using different framework, so if you will learn the most popular ones like React, there are big companies = a lot of job opportunities for you.

For example, I work in Microsoft and we heavily moved to React, but historically we were using multiple different frameworks and some of them probably don't exist anymore. The good thing about these the most favorite frameworks is that you have available a lot of extensions, UI components, etc. so you don't need to develop everything from scratch. E.g. we have created the library of UI components called Fluent UI which we use cross all our products and our partners usually follow same frameworks because they know that since we use it for all our products, it guarantees support and future development of these frameworks and that's very important because you don't want to spend your time on fixing the framework which should speed up your work (that's probably a not right framework). These UI component libraries will help you to easily compose your applications without being a great designer and they usually implement enterprise requirements like theming, localizations, etc..

Everything what you learn will at least give you a different view on same problem and that's also very valuable experience and you can apply these ideas in another frameworks as well.

I would probably have a look what is your goal and if you have enough career opportunities in these areas and maybe pick a framework based on that. You want to learn/know something what you can apply in professional career. Knowing technologies which are not very often used will make your job search harder.

Good luck! :)
Martin
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