Flutter Engage Extended Remote Meetup, April 2021 | FlutterBLR x GeekyAnts

Flutter Engage 2021 was the biggest and the most anticipated event in and for the Flutter community and it delivered some bombs that everyone was waiting for. With a plethora of new and big announcements plus a lot of other talks and discussions, Flutter Engage opened the doors to a new world of all things Flutter and we were excited to get on board the Flutter Engage Extended Meetup bandwagon happening all across the globe.

The following is an account of everything that happened at the event:

Devanand Padmanaban, Software Engineer at GeekyAnts opened the event with a quick recap of everything that was announced at the Flutter Engage event. The biggest highlight of the event was the official announcement of Flutter 2, which now supports Windows, MacOS, Linux and web and provides a single codebase for all the supported platforms, thereby making it a true cross-platform technology. For a demonstration of how the new and improved Flutter works on all platforms and devices, follow this link. In addition to that, the Google Pay app has now been completely rewritten in Flutter, reducing tech debt by 90% and increasing engineering productivity by 20%. It has also been wonderful to see companies like Toyota putting their trust in Flutter to power their vehicle dashboards and infotainment systems.Another major announcement was about Flutter Web being stable. Alongside these announcements, lots of other updates on Firebase, Google Mobile Ads and Flutter for Ubuntu were also shared. 

Hasnen Tai, Engineer at Toshiba, took the opportunity to address the problem of depreciating widgets through Material Buttons and Themes. His talk revolved around the basics of Material Buttons and their themes, ScaffoldMessenger and Asynchronous Snack Bars. The idea behind introducing these concepts was to make it easy to configure the visual properties of standard button widgets using overall application specific themes. He talked about changing naming conventions, what the new conventions stand for and shared solid sources of information on the updates to Material Buttons and their themes. He then explored the new ScaffoldMessenger in depth, giving a live demo of how it works, followed by the use cases of Asynchronous SnackBars.

A freelance developer and GDE for Flutter & Dart, Thomas Burkhart presented one of his pet projects that he’s been working on and how it can help simplify locating services for Dart. GetIt is a service locator built for Dart by Thomas which makes it easy to switch implementations simply by switching the concrete type at registration time. Coming from a DotNet background, he tried to port a service locator called ‘Splat’ into Dart and succeeded. He explained the inner workings of GetIt and shared its architecture. Then, with the help of examples, he explained the various things that you can do with GetIt in depth. He explained the different types of registrations, how you can switch implementations easily, injection patterns for testing and many more. He also delved a little into startup orchestration and scopes of the tool before closing his talk.

As the final talk of the day, Manas Pratap, SE at GeekyAnts talked about his most recent experiment of building a blockchain application using Flutter. He divided his talk into the intuition behind the project, the actual development and the use cases of this experiment. He started by explaining what blockchain is and how it works. Then he went into great depth of how he developed the contract and the UI of the app, how he deployed it and integrated it with the other parts of this application. He used Etherium as his choice of contract, Truffle & Ganache as his tool to test blockchain networks and then delved into the code of the app and explained how he implemented all of the different modules of the app. Finally, he displayed the app in action and closed his talk with some tips and tricks that can be used to build this app. 

The event then transitioned into an FAQ session with Mariam Hasnany, Product Manager with the Flutter Web team at Google and Thomas Buckhart, a speaker at the event and GDE, Flutter & Dart. The questions were curated from the viewers and the Flutter community, and were posed to the panel members to answer. You can watch the entire segment below:

Watch the complete event below: