Server-Side Steroids for your Flutter App! - Chirag Shenoy | Flutter Europe

How cool would it be to have an app which is completely controlled by the backend? No, I don't mean A/B tests or deciding which color a button should be, or what set of features should be available for a certain user. I mean EVERYTHING being controlled from the backend. Be it all your app layouts, handling click events, what API calls to make, maintaining local databases, deciding how to display content on different devices, or even what screen to show next! Customization and flexibility on Steroids.

Speaker: Chirag Shenoy

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[vaibh]

Great presentation, Chirag! An interesting idea well broken down and explained nicely with relevant examples wherever needed.

[raveeshdotme]

Parsing XML -> Composing Widgets Declaratively -> Parsing JSON... We've come full circle of reverse evolution.

[Mahorir]

1. The talk starts with stating server side rendering as a mechanism to allow app updates for people with bad internet connection.
2. The amount of data that has to come in Via APIs is much more in the case of server side rendering. Eg. Instead of sending just a image path (probably 100bytes), you are now sending 1000s of bytes because the payload completely describes the resources now.

It would have been great if the presenter talked about data consumption numbers before and after this change.

In my option, while this is technically cool and all but seems to me developers creating more work for themselves and product managers not doing their jobs.

[BrahmaAcharya]

Very cool. Just a simple question. Couldn't you have just made a PWA?

[rydmike]

Very interesting architecture you built, I have been wondering if something like this would be doable with Flutter. Nice to learn it has already been done. Thanks for sharing insights into how you built it. I have to wonder though how Apple and Google might react to apps using tech like this down the road, as it would be completely possible to change what an app actually is and does after its release, this could potentially be misused. On the hole the solution is very interesting and could potentially have very broad use and application for how apps are made and updated. 👍

[KhainiSader]

wow nice, I was thinking of doing this too(server side updates for UI)

[regis]

How would state be managed in this approach?
How do you set up the variables the app is gonna use?
Is it testable?

[porada_app]

Cool, why not to use some param in json like:
{
"component_id": "",
"main_axis_count" : "",
"max_height":""

[ChandanKumar-hjeq]

Wow, I was wondering at the start of this video about - how could it be achieved. Noycceee.

[aswins]

At the start of the presentation it said, users usually don't update apps due to unavailability of internet or to reduce the data packet usage, but now in order to run the app u need constant internet access. I have only reached 8 min of the video going to watch the rest of it. Will edit this if my opinion is changed.

[mazenebeid]

Does this sound like a huge overkill? How often do you ship new features that requires you to controll the whole UI from the backend .. I understand about certain views to be toggled from the backend to update the app state like locked or being in uat-testing and so on but this just feels like a lot of work to achieve something that doesn't necessarily add a lot of value

Nonetheless this is some great effort and is worthy of being mentioned

[_dinesh]

Sorry this is a terrible idea! just re-inventing the whole wheel. Creates more problem than being helpful. Removes all the type safety checks and code completion features. And most importantly, updating and maintaining the code could be a nightmare. My 2 cents.

[AramSaleem]

I was wondering to that channel. it is amazing. I would love to make a team in Iraq. How do I do it? please Help. I will name it Flutter Iraq or Flutter Kurd. cause I am Kurd.

[MohammedAbdulHaiZahid]

totally bad idea. It's called fighting with the platform instead of using its power. We do a far better job by extending widgets and having simple custom widgets.

[arpanmukherjee]

Interesting. But this guy takes too much time explaining so slow, I almost slept.