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Can anyone help me decide what's best for app development or even android Oreo development? I'm in a state dilemma at the moment. I want to do Android programming, not necessarily web development. I have heard a lot of people recommend one of these, and it seems that both the tools can do the job. Which language would you choose?
I assume that you mean Flutter by Dart. I have over 6 years experience programming in Android SDK, but about 1,5 month in Flutter. So far I think that Flutter is the future for mobile development. Flutter SDK is much better designed. Ecosystem of libraries seems having much higher quality. I would even say that android opensource libs are having really poor quality. Many times I am wondering how can garbage like that have so many stars at GitHub. Android SDK is hard to compose so you reinvent even basic things on and on, which is totally different story at Flutter. Lolcycle? Both are having good documentation. I quess apps in Flutter can be done in 1/3 of time compared to develop AndroidSDK and iOS, its design is that much better and contemporary. As of language comparison - Kotlin is better, but the difference is not that important. Go from one language to other is no problem. Dart is being updated with new features.
I've selected Flutter and Dart for my side projects and never regretted. Dart learning curve is easy after any OOP language . Flutter as a framework is also has a low entry threshold. I've already started development after a week of learning. Pros for me: code can be build for Android and IOS devices (for ios you need mac or VM), apps written in Dart have great performance on each of these platforms, flexibility. Cons: if you want to build a product as a business and want to hire a new Flutter Developer in the future it can be a problem as the framework and language is not popular for the moment.
It depends on what is the purpose of your app development. Do you want to make one app that shares the codebase for both iOS and Android? If yes, then Dart is the way to go. Does your app include interacting with hardware features like camera, Bluetooth, if yes, then go for native Android for better performance? Dart is good for simpler UI apps where you just do basic crud operations over the network and show data but if you need richer UI experience go with native.
I have worked in mobile development since 2010. I have experienced myself on various techs including Native SDK (Android), React Native (from 2016) and Flutter (2018). Almost the apps nowadays can be built using cross-platforms frameworks like React Native or Flutter. I suggest you start with Flutter. Flutter SDK is designed well to speed up your development and it still keeps the quality for your apps. If you're familiar with OOP languages (Java, C#...), switching to Dart is really quick and easy. Of course, sometimes you will need to dive deep into native parts but almost the cases you don't need. Good luck!
We were thinking about what to do to make working with our internal Java applications a bit more fun. We use Dropwizard in all of our main backend systems and while Dropwizard has served us well, it has a lot of boilerplate and team members who were joining that were used to Spring / Spring Boot were finding Dropwizard lacking.
We'd also had teams starting to use Lombok to help cutdown on boilerplate POJOs, but the infrastructure team and, well, myself included, were concerned about how Lombok is implemented as a bytecode manipulator. We're cool with generators, but bytecode manipulation seems a bridge too far for many reasons.
We realized that Kotlin can help with both problems, potentially cutting down on boilerplate POJOs and helping with some of the patterns that people find cumbersome in Dropwizard. The fact that you can 'drop in' Kotlin into an existing application or convert it whole-hog without functionality changes is a real game changer for us and made that technology much easier to implement.
We value not leaving all of our 50+ Java services behind, and would rather work with technologies that will allow all teams and all of our services to be easier to work with and more maintainable.
It's still early days with Kotlin, but so far the teams are very excited.
From cross platform development point of view: Using kotlin multiplatform is more convenient than java for implementing cross platform code, since it can be converted to be used in iOS (swift) projects, and it can be easily learned if you already know swift. It still an experimental feature but it helped so far to unify a lot of the common code between our iOS and Android projects. And it is more future proof than java regarding support and maintain multiplatform converting.
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!
Pros of Kotlin
- Interoperable with Java73
- Functional Programming support55
- Null Safety51
- Official Android support46
- Backed by JetBrains44
- Concise37
- Modern Multiplatform Applications36
- Expressive Syntax28
- Target to JVM27
- Coroutines26
- Open Source24
- Statically Typed19
- Practical elegance19
- Android support17
- Type Inference17
- Readable code14
- Powerful as Scala, simple as Python, plus coroutines <313
- Better Java12
- Pragmatic10
- Lambda9
- Better language for android8
- Expressive DSLs8
- Target to JavaScript8
- Used for Android6
- Less boilerplate code6
- Fast Programming language5
- Less code5
- Native4
- Less boiler plate code4
- Friendly community4
- Functional Programming Language4
- Spring3
- Official Google Support3
- Latest version of Java2
- Well-compromised featured Java alternative1
Pros of Lombok
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Cons of Kotlin
- Java interop makes users write Java in Kotlin7
- Frequent use of {} keys4
- Hard to make teams adopt the Kotlin style2
- Nonullpointer Exception2
- Friendly community1
- Slow compiler1
- No boiler plate code1