- Is Web Development supported with flutter?
- Is Flutter a native or web?
- Can Flutter be used for the web?
- Is Flutter good enough for the web?
- Is Flutter web faster than react?
- Do I need CSS for Flutter?
- Does Flutter web have a future?
We get so many queries along these lines that we decided to answer all of them.
YES, YOU CAN! 🎉
Indeed, you read it right, we see so many queries every day from developers who want to utilize their knowledge of dart and flutter with mobile applications as well as web applications, exactly how react developers build both web applications and native ones with the knowledge of the same library. Isn’t that great? You can check out the stable channel of flutter web support that is ready for production.
What Can You Build?
According to Flutters FAQs their web support is convenient to build
- PWA (Progressive Web Applications)
- SPA (Single Page Applications)
- Existing Flutter mobile apps
Hot Restart vs Hot Reload
Although native flutter allows the developer to hot reload the application during development, in flutter web, one has to hot restart their application to see their changes. What is the difference? Hot reload remembers the state of you application whereas hot restart doesn’t.
Browsers Supported By Flutter
Here is a list of browsers that can run your flutter web application flawlessly
- Chrome
- Safari
- Edge
- Firefox
Plugin Support?
Not all but many of the flutter plugins come with web support. You can go to pub.dev and get all the web plugins using the filter.
Concurrency With Flutter Web
Concurrency support in dart via isolates is not available in flutter web, instead, it uses web workers. That means the is no built-in support for concurrency in flutter web.
Community And Support
Being recently released in the stable channel, there is not much support or community for flutter web, it takes some time to grow the community and pile up questions and issues with their responses. It becomes mature with time, but if you do run into any issue with flutter web you can file it on the main flutter repo with ‘web’ in the title.
Live Flutter Web Apps
There are handful of applications using flutter web behind the scene to build it
Concluding
The question is, is it time to start using flutter web for production now that is stable? In my personal opinion, now is not the best time, maybe sometime later. Javascript has been here for a very long time and is exceptional in terms of performance and many factors. It’s an easy pick between pure JS and dart for developers but that is, for now, 😉, who knows what the future holds? But one thing is for sure that there is room for improvement with flutter web.
I hope I didn’t bore you out in this article and that you learned something new. I’ll see you at the next one. Take care. 🫡
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