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Flutter - Web build target

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4
a month ago
DuncanC
by
Frequent Contributor
a month ago

I'm curious if ESRI's plans for flutter include being able to build for the web?

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4 Replies
LucasDanzinger
by Esri Frequent Contributor
Esri Frequent Contributor
a month ago

Hey Duncan, thanks for splitting this question out 🙂

 

It's something we have thought about, but there are significant technological hurdles that we would need to solve to make it happen. This is primarily driven by the fact that our SDK is driven fully by the Native SDK's Runtime Core C++ library. Web would require us to use JavaScript API as well, or possibly WebAssembly. The logistics of either of those options have lots of unknowns and work related to them. Given that, I see the chances of this happening in the near term as being pretty low. However, we will continue to monitor this post and discuss with customers to understand the need for this.

 

Thanks,

Lucas

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DuncanC
by
Frequent Contributor
a month ago

I do understand.  But doing that work is the whole purpose of a cross platform framework like Flutter.  Work is going to have to be done either way.  Either it's done once on the SDK end, or every dev gets to do it when they write the UI that they just build in flutter a second time for the web. 

LucasDanzinger
by Esri Frequent Contributor
Esri Frequent Contributor
a month ago

Thanks Duncan. We've heard a few other people asking about web support, but when asked for specifics, we didn't get a lot of details. It seemed like people were more wondering if it's an option, rather than having projects where they had this requirement. One of the main questions I have is whether organizations want to build 1 app that runs on mobile, desktop, and web, and if so, what are some examples or use cases? Often times, the expectations of capabilities, workflows, and certainly UX change drastically between those mediums. Alternatively, is it more that you might build separate mobile, desktop, and web apps, but that you like being able to use the same technology to build those apps?

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DuncanC
by
Frequent Contributor
a month ago

I have a specific project that I've just started development on.  I'm building the UI in flutter as I have several components I want to use both on web and mobile. I need them to be consistent and I want them to have a single codebase to maintain.  Not being able to build to the web will mean I won't use the new ESRI flutter SDK in this project, I'll embed a web view and use the web components or the JS SDK to handle it, or just use flutter_map.  Whatever solution I end up on it will be one where I can write it once and have it work on all targets.

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