Why Flutter is ready for enterprise application development

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This article is very hard, if you are building an APP, or you are writing flutter technical papers, you can refer to it.

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https://betterprogramming.pub/heres-why-flutter-is-now-ready-for-enterprise-app-development-1986ef2cd3e3

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Are you ready for enterprise application development? For a long time, this has been one of the most frequently asked questions by developers. But after the Beta release, this platform showed a lot of prospects and provided a large number of localization features, making the development of localized applications easier.

Although the mobile application development market is indeed shifting towards a powerful application development process experience, one of the main obstacles is the division of labor between iOS and Android application development. Since users of these two operating systems are spread all over the world, companies must pay attention to this when targeting audiences to ensure that their brands do not miss any market.

This article will help you understand why flutter is ready to authorize businesses.

When Google announced the first stable version (1.0) of Flutter in 2018, people wondered if it was a good enterprise-level mobile application development tool.

Fast forward to today, and I am proud that I decided to try Flutter for enterprise application development.

I know that many of you are wondering why Flutter has received widespread attention in application development, because its positioning is no different from other cross-platform development tools, which provide native iOS and Android applications. Build once, deploy to every place!

Unlike others, I avoid getting stuck in these statements!

In a year's time, there are now more than 4000 plugins supporting Flutter applications. The media, YouTube, Stack Overflow, and more websites are full of content suggesting that Flutter can help you create a variety of applications for different business areas.

Flutter is king, at least when it comes to enterprise application development solutions. This is not only my opinion, but also an overwhelming voice from the mobile application development industry.

https://www.xicom.ae/services/mobile-app-development/

According to Google's statistics, 500,000 developers use Google Software Development Kit every month.

https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/22/google-500000-developers-flutter-release-process-versioning-changes/

In addition, Flutter's SDK is the second fastest growing project on GitHub, which makes it stand out from competitors in the industry. All of this points to a thriving community, eager to share, grow, and improve Flutter!

https://techmonitor.ai/technology/software/top-10-programming-languages

With all these facts, now is the time to decide whether Flutter and its libraries are ready to develop enterprise mobile applications in 2021.

Before we go directly to the requirements that you may need to develop specific enterprise Android applications, my simple goal is to find at least one Flutter solution for each requirement, and make you believe that Flutter is now ready to develop an enterprise with almost no mixed code requirements. application.

Of course, the requirements of business applications vary from project to project, so the final result may be different.

Let's first briefly introduce Flutter.

Framework overview

Flutter is an open source UI software development kit widely used for cross-platform application development. By using a single code base, mobile application development companies can create various types of applications, from simple chat applications to on-demand shopping applications. It differs from other frameworks in that Flutter applications are written in Google's object-oriented programming language Dart.

Google chose Dart while considering the following four points:

Productivity
Faster allocation
Object orientation
High performance

With these facts, Flutter can help developers develop native applications for iOS, Android, and web platforms, and these applications can run seamlessly on multiple platforms.

UI performance, source code maturity, security testing, and functionality are the main challenges developers encounter when designing applications for different platforms. Flutter application development can help you solve such problems with extreme ease.

Now, what exactly is an enterprise application, what are the main requirements to build it, and how does Flutter contribute to the process?

Enterprise-level mobile applications

First, does enterprise application only mean the development of leading brands?

Whether you are a progressive startup or a leading organization, enterprise applications are for everyone. These applications are specifically designed and developed for the limited and protected use of the corporate workforce. For enterprise applications, administrators can centrally process data, achieve large-scale automation, and maintain a smooth workflow. But in order to make it functional, enterprise applications require many features, high security, and a seamless UI design with a robust framework to ensure high performance.

Let's take a look at the specific requirements for building enterprise applications and see if Flutter and its library package ecosystem are ready for this task.

The following are the basic requirements I chose. There is a lot to cover in each requirement category, although I have tried to briefly assume that the reader is already familiar with the basic features of Flutter.

Layered architecture
Development environment
User interface
Hardware features
App security
Miscellaneous requirements

Layered architecture to ensure better functionality

When developing an enterprise application, make sure it has a layered architecture to ensure seamless functionality and increase productivity through the various skills of different development teams.

When layers are inserted, the developer must find a way to provide the following functions:

Better access to the complete design pattern of the document
A large number of developers are working on the code base
It is easy to understand various application functions

Flutter shines here by providing a simple and secure network for network resources, local storage, SQLite databases, and access to hardware through plug-ins.

Let's see how:

State management: The current position is the core of Flutter's application architecture, and Google's recent proposal is to use the Provider framework, which is easier to understand and build. At the same time, other state management such as widgets inherited by Redux, BLoC, InheritedWidget, setState, etc., they coexist within reason., setState, etc., they coexist within a reasonable range
RxDart: If Dart's streams and asynchronous packages cannot meet your asynchronous programming needs, then it is a wise decision to consider RxDart. It seamlessly integrates with Flutter and state management framework
Background processing: It allows computationally intensive work to be performed in the application while keeping the user interface responsive at the same time. Depending on the complexity of the background processing requirements, you may need to use native platform features other than the pure Dart implementation
Dependency injection: Dependency injection: In order to make your application code unit independent and reusable, mobile application developers can use dependency injection. This is a design pattern that makes code easier to test. GetIT locator is a simple and easy-to-use DI library that works seamlessly with the state management framework to ensure separation of the application layer
JSON serialization/deserialization JSON serialization/deserialization: important for any RESTful client and common in most enterprise applications
Deep linking: It provides correct navigation from a website or push notification to launch a specific area within the app
Local storage: Provide a small amount of key/value data stored locally, and then help your application work, even if the application is in the background or stopped
SQLite: can be used to process large amounts of structured data
Push notifications: For enterprise-level applications, back-end integration is usually required to help you notify users of expiration dates, reminders about services, etc. For this, firebasmessaging is a one-stop solution

Development environment for local Android and iOS applications

For the development environment, developers can choose their Flutter IDE between Android Studio/IntelliJ and Visual Studio Code. All of these are well supported on Mac, PC, Linux and Chromebook. All you need is to adopt Flutter application development with the right experience.

In these IDEs, developers can implement construction, device deployment, debugging, and performance analysis. But to create a development environment/deployment for local iOS, you need to use Xcode on your Mac.

Scalability: The flutter application is easy to expand because it is based on the Dart ecosystem and introduces Dart packages to provide the functionality of external libraries. The flutter project can be reorganized into the flutter dart package, providing another way to divide the work of a large team, making it easier to expand the application
Testability: Whether you are using unit tests, widget tests, or, or integration tests, each Flutter widget can be easily tested. All these test tools allow maximum test coverage and are only limited by available time and resources
Continuous integration/continuous delivery: Use excellent Android and iOS toolsets to deploy applications to the Google Play Store or Apple Store so that they can be used in any existing enterprise mobile CI/CD setup

Mobile application development companies that cooperate with Flutter can spend most of their time in the Flutter/Dart environment while deploying Flutter applications to Android and iOS devices. Knowledge of how to build and sign applications and provisioning profiles, etc. is essential to implement a successful flapping application.

User Interface

The application program interface plays an important role in the user experience. Enterprise mobile applications strive to focus on providing excellent user interfaces. To meet this need, Flutter provides a comprehensive set of high-precision demonstrations for Android and iOS.

To make your user interface more attractive, you can integrate:

Animations: It's easy to start learning animations, they can be extended to any complexity. For the widely used Flutter, you can include flare, which is a complete 2D vector animation library. Application development companies are using this tool extensively to customize enterprise applications with seamless interfaces
Page transitions: They can be a perfect example to learn how to navigate between application pages and animations can be achieved
Paging or infinite scrolling list view: This is a common requirement when you need to display a large amount of data to the user without taking up a lot of device memory. This is the latest trend of the year mobile application development services, because Flutter provides infinite scrolling with a rich content repository
Image loading/caching library Image loading/caching library: It provides a fast and simple way to process many images, including caching when the basic image or SVG image is not good enough. Therefore, Flutter application developers can easily manage images through loading and caching libraries

Finally, you can provide Google and Apple maps on the Flutter mobile app.

Hardware feature requirements

No matter how well you customize your application and provide a wide range of functions, no application can work without hardware support.

Therefore, when you hire application developers to develop enterprise applications for enterprise employees/users/employees, you need hardware and software support:

https://www.xicom.ae/solutions/hire-developers/

Camera
Accelerometer
GPS Global Positioning System
Biometric authentication, including fingerprint and face ID
Microphone

Mobile application security

Security is an area that companies cannot destroy--whether it is basic enterprise applications or advanced applications. Protecting application data security is one of the most important issues for enterprises. Therefore, there are various things to be aware of when creating enterprise applications. There is no doubt that this is a very broad topic, but I will narrow it down to a few specific points to make it easy to understand.

Assuming that Flutter applications are built on top of the Android and iOS sandbox environments, each Flutter application has inherent security aspects for native iOS and Android applications.

The most basic requirements, such as authentication (biometrics, thumb fingerprints, two-level password), cater to Flutter's simple authentication well.

Here are other certification providers you can consider:

Amazon Amazon
Facebook
GitHub
Google
Dropbox
Azure Active Directory Azure Active Directory
LinkedIn
Instagram photo sharing
Microsoft Live Connect Microsoft Live Connect

SSL certificate pinning is also important because it reduces the possibility of attacks due to shared servers. It ensures the security of web (HTTPS) requests and is supported.

Secure storage provides a way to securely store a small amount of keys or valuable information on the device, allowing your application to work even when there is no Internet connection.

Miscellaneous requirements

In addition to all the above requirements, here are some multiple requirements that need to be considered when developing enterprise applications:

Analytics analysis: The analysis library can meet this requirement on Flutter
Error reporting: Developers can use Flutter's Sentry library plugin.
Third-party or open source libraries: This list of third-party plugins before you start randomly picking and using one in your application
Generating QR codes: Generating QR codes: Whether for advanced functions of the application or for security purposes, QR code scanning is very important

Consider this:

Share application details on social media accounts
Access personal contact list
Allow camera or location while using app
Send SMS or multimedia message or receive SMS one-time password
Use the in-app payment SDK within the app.

Flutter's cross-platform support goes beyond iOS and Android

We only discussed Flutter's support for native iOS and Android applications, but Flutter is greatly expanding its support for web, macOS, Windows, and Linux. To develop an application that can be seamlessly deployed and executed on all these platforms, you only need to use a piece of code, which is your goal all the time.

At the same time, you must accept the fact that not all platforms support all the same features. For example, Google Maps currently only supports Android, iOS and the web. On the other hand, these are the main platforms currently operated by users.

By leveraging the potential of Flutter and its wide selection of widgets, you can target mobile devices and the web. In addition, it is better to have a responsive screen with Flutter's built-in application, which looks different devices and screens suitable for users. All of these can be easily achieved through a code base.

to sum up

In application development, Flutter has become more and more popular, but with the wide support of libraries, it has quickly become a viable choice for enterprises to create enterprise applications in a short period of time.

The best part is that companies, technology companies, startups, and individual developers in any industry niche can use the right mobile application development company to realize their potential and create an application. With the proper use of a healthy and growing flutter library packaging ecosystem, it may be time for companies to shine in the competitive market and establish their foothold in the industry for the next ten years.

https://www.xicom.ae/services/mobile-app-development/

Thanks to Anupam Chugh.

https://ducafecat.tech/

https://github.com/ducafecat