Overview

Java

Stacks148.0K

Followers105.5K

Votes3.7K

Flutter

Stacks17.7K

Followers16.8K

Votes1.2K

GitHub Stars173.7K

Forks29.4K

Flutter vs Java: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will explore the key differences between Flutter and Java, two popular technologies used for app development.

Language: Flutter uses Dart as its programming language, while Java is used for Android app development. Dart is a modern, object-oriented language with features like strong typing and just-in-time compilation. Java, on the other hand, is a widely adopted, general-purpose, object-oriented language with a vast ecosystem.
User Interface: Flutter provides a rich set of UI components called widgets, which are customizable and provide a consistent look and feel across different platforms. Java, on the other hand, uses XML-based layout files and programming code to create the user interface. While it provides flexibility, it requires more code to achieve the desired UI.
Cross-platform Development: Flutter is a cross-platform framework that allows developers to write code once and deploy it on multiple platforms like Android, iOS, web, and desktop. Java, on the other hand, is primarily used for Android app development and requires separate codebases for other platforms.
Performance: Flutter uses its own rendering engine called Skia, which provides high-performance graphics. It also uses a hot-reload feature that enables developers to see the changes in real-time. Java, on the other hand, relies on the Android runtime and can sometimes have performance limitations.
Development Speed: Flutter's hot-reload feature speeds up the development process by allowing developers to see the changes instantly. It also has a rich set of pre-built UI components that can be customized easily. Java, on the other hand, requires a build process each time a change is made, which can slow down the development process.
Community and Ecosystem: Flutter has a growing and vibrant community with a wide range of packages and libraries available. It also has extensive documentation and support from Google. Java, on the other hand, has been around for a long time and has a mature ecosystem with a vast number of libraries and resources.

Overall, Flutter offers a modern, efficient, and cross-platform solution for app development, while Java provides a robust and widely adopted platform primarily for Android app development.

In summary, Flutter uses Dart as its programming language, provides a rich set of UI components, is cross-platform, offers high-performance graphics, ensures faster development speed with hot-reload, and has a growing community and ecosystem. Java, on the other hand, uses XML-based layouts, is primarily for Android development, relies on the Android runtime, requires a build process for changes, and has a mature ecosystem and community.

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Advice on Java, Flutter

Nick

Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream

Sep 5, 2019

Review

I work at Stream and I'm immensely proud of what our team is working on here at the company. Most recently, we announced our Android SDK accompanied by an extensive tutorial for Java and Kotlin. The tutorial covers just about everything you need to know when it comes to using our Android SDK for Stream Chat. The Android SDK touches many features offered by Stream Chat – more specifically, typing status, read state, file uploads, threads, reactions, editing messages, and commands. Head over to https://getstream.io/tutorials/android-chat/ and give it a whirl!

176k views176k

Comments

Ido

Mar 6, 2020

Decided

When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.

You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.

267k views267k

Comments

Brent

CEO at DEFY Labs

Mar 7, 2020

Decided

Node.js has been growing in popularity, and the ability to access the global pool of Javascript developers is great. There is a decreased amount of effort for people to work across the frontend and backend, and the language itself is easy and works well for many common use cases.

Go was the other serious candidate, but it just hasn't been implemented in as many Production systems yet, and the best Go engineers I've known have been hackers, whereas we're building a robust analytics platform that requires more caution. Type safety is easily added with TypeScript, and NPM is awesomely handy.

369k views369k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Java	Flutter
Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!	Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.
-	Fast development - Flutter's "hot reload" helps you quickly and easily experiment, build UIs, add features, and fix bug faster. Experience sub-second reload times, without losing state, on emulators, simulators, and hardware for iOS and Android.;Expressive UIs - Delight your users with Flutter's built-in beautiful Material Design and Cupertino (iOS-flavor) widgets, rich motion APIs, smooth natural scrolling, and platform awareness.;Access native features and SDKs - Make your app come to life with platform APIs, 3rd party SDKs, and native code. Flutter lets you reuse your existing Java, Swift, and ObjC code, and access native features and SDKs on iOS and Android.
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 173.7K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 29.4K
Stacks 148.0K	Stacks 17.7K
Followers 105.5K	Followers 16.8K
Votes 3.7K	Votes 1.2K
Pros & Cons
Pros 607 Great libraries 446 Widely used 401 Excellent tooling 396 Huge amount of documentation available 334 Large pool of developers available Cons 33 Verbosity 27 NullpointerException 17 Nightmare to Write 16 Overcomplexity is praised in community culture 12 Boiler plate code	Pros 149 Hot Reload 126 Cross platform 107 Performance 90 Backed by Google 74 Compiled into Native Code Cons 29 Need to learn Dart 11 Lack of community support 10 No 3D Graphics Engine Support 8 Graphics programming 6 Lack of friendly documentation
Integrations
Spring	Android SDK Firebase Dart

What are some alternatives to Java, Flutter?

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Ionic

Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.