News
Announcing Flutter support for Dart null safety | Flutter
Technical Preview #2 for Dart null safety is here! In this article, Michael Thomsen covers the essentials, including why null safety is important, null safety principles, and the order in which you should implement the feature in different packages.
Note that if you'd prefer a video presentation to help you get started, this one should do the trick.
Tutorials
Exploring Collections in Dart
Still working on understanding the differences between a List, Set, Map, Queue, and SplayTreeMap in Dart? This tutorial by John Ryan of the Dart and Flutter team has you covered.
I especially appreciated John's discussion of using collections to refactor those Flutter build methods. A cleaner ListView, anyone?
Architecture
Bloc to Bloc Communication
If you're using the flutter_bloc package in your app to manage state, no doubt you've run into situations where one Bloc needs to communicate with another.
Although the conversation in this video moves quickly, YouTuber Flutterly covers this topic with a great example, including one bloc which keeps track of network connection status and which forwards that state to other bloc(s) in the app.
Structural Design Patterns for Dart and Flutter: Decorator
Monty Rasmussen has written a series of articles about design patterns for Dart and Flutter, and this one covers the Decorator pattern:
The Decorator pattern is a way to extend objects using composition as opposed to inheritance, which is the approach that works most naturally in a Flutter application.
Business and Marketing
Startups Must Employ Flutter Developers
OK, so I missed this article when it first appeared a couple of months ago, but I found it compelling. Granted, Adam is preaching to the choir when it comes to meshing with my own views on Flutter, but any startup who goes immediately to a "native-only" tech-stack without even considering Flutter, has a good chance of missing out.
Flutter User Survey Results from Q3 2020
It's great to see this deep-dive into the characteristics which make up all of the Flutter developers who responded to this survey.
Of particular interest is all of the trends which surface here, including the number of enterprise devs using Flutter, the number of devs satisfied with the platform, and the proportion of "advanced" users among the respondents.
At the very least, whether good or bad, the results seem to indicate that Flutter is continuing to grow up.
// From Mark
Dart - Issue #22 Officially Closed
I've written about the significance of null safety in Dart in several of these newsletters, and it appears that it's now getting closer than ever.
On the dart-lang/sdk github account, Issue #22 was opened way back in 2011, and was just closed yesterday.
If you're not up to speed on null safety yet, it's time to get started!
Mark Winters