The Vocabulary Advancer app's first purpose is apparently to assist in settlement of advanced vocabulary with phrase cards... which should be reviewed at appropriate intervals. So, this is an another one mobile app for words memorization.
The trick is, its main purpose is not just that. This repository serves the Flutter Starter App baseline solution, showcasing the initial project setup and helping to minimize the gap between hello-world-tutorials and a production ready Flutter app.
Flutter as the UI toolkit over Dart Platform already proved its viability and great advantages to build nicely looking mobile apps. Apart from the app consumer perspectives, it brings lovely development experience as well.
The flexibility in code decomposition, wide range of community-driven packages, different approaches in UI state management and widget lookups give the power to developers but may bring a sort of confusion for learners.
This app is actually one of many examples which help to settle a minimal set of technical decisions for a Flutter app from scratch. So the actual goals are:
- Define a baseline example solution for my team mentees and Flutter learners
- Standardize our infrastructural approaches for new Flutter apps and express them in this Starter App
- Use as an accelerator to speed up new own projects
- Overall decomposition of app architectural layers sample
- Application and Dependency registry initialization
- Environment Flavours (DEV vs QA vs PROD, etc.)
- Feature Toggles (opt-in functionalty)
- Centralized and strongly typed Navigation service
- Centralized Dialog service
- Model validation
- Application themes (and custom font)
- Localization (for now, with vscode-flutter-i18n-json)
- Unit tests (with mockito)
- Code analysis enforced (with lint)
- If not yet, ensure Flutter SDK is installed correctly, visit https://flutter.dev/docs/get-started/install for details.
- If not yet, add a Flutter plugin to your IDE. Supported: Android Studio, VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA. Review instructions: https://flutter.dev/docs/development/tools
- Git clone this repository,
git clone https://github.com/kugjo/va.git - Stay on the master branch
- Fetch dependent Dart/Flutter packages,
flutter pub get - If needed by your IDE, add a new Build Configuration with ./src/lib/main.dart Flutter app entry point
- Run on a selected device/emulator
From high perspective, the following code decomposition was considered for this Starter App:
This seems to be the essential setup which is pretty familiar to any developer from any technology stack. We should bear in mind that Flutter's "everything is a widget" term is nearly a metaphor, and as an approach to a production-ready solution, should be treated as the UI construction paradigm only.
Even for minimal apps based on this Starter baseline, for good Testability and easier code maintenace, the following areas are explicitly distinguished and considered as separated in terms of code responsibility:
- App, Application Presentation Layer
- Presentation (Widgets and navigation routing aware UI)
- Presentation Logic (View Models: UI state management and invalidation, interactivity reactions)
- Presentation Services (UX patterns implementation, navigation, etc.)
- Core, Domain Business Layer
- Model (for now, just plain entities or value like types)
- Application Services (Domain services which encapsulate the business rules)
- Extensions (Value types converters and data interpretation helpers)
- Data, Data Access Layer, Networking and Persistence
- Repositories (probably, the most common pattern today)
- Mappings (Data Transfer Objects to Entities transformations)
- Data Sources (Local storage and Remote API clients)
- Shared, Cross-Cutting or common code. The most important here is:
- Service Locator (Inversion-Of-Control dependencies registry)
- Shell, the essential part of the infrastructure to manage the app startup and initialization:
- Environment (basic DEV/QA/PROD flavours support)
- Bootstrapper (application-level dependencies initializer)