Hi,
I did a quickly trial with Xamarin and Flutter yesterday on a macOS environment.
Reason: After years only using Flex/AIR for Mobile (also a small project with pure native Android code),
I was away for mobile on the last year and in a month I will get back but I decided not go thru Flex/AIR.
I decided to move to another technology.
After a research, I will go for Xamarin or Flutter.
Xamarin:
Previous experience: no
.NET experience: yes
UI layout: XML
Code behind: C#
Native emulators for Android and iOS: yes
Preview on editor: yes (real time but I don't know if works with a serious app)
Hot reload: no
IDE: Visual Studio for Mac
Provider: Microsoft
Status: Stable
Community: Very big
Flutter:
Previous experience: no
DART experience: no
UI layout: DART
Code behind: DART
Native emulators for Android and iOS: yes
Preview on editor: no
Hot reload: yes (real time)
IDE: IntelliJ
Provider: Google
Status: 1.0
Community: Very small
My experience with Xamarin:
- Xamarin have 2 modes (Xamarin.Android + Xamarin.iOS and Hybrid mode called Xamarin.Forms).
My goal is to code once like AIR so I go for Forms mode.
- Forms use XML very similar to Flex and it's used to and for me it's a plus
- In a couple of minutes a created without many constraints a small trial App with 2 forms (navigation), data binding, form item and a message box (I liked the native looking)
- On overall it's similar with Flex/AIR with the bonus of .NET
My experience with Flutter:
- Flutter use DART for everything, so that, the UI is designed with only with code and at the end I easy get a mixed of UI and logic on the same file that I dont' like at all
- Flutter/DART code style it's component calling component ... at I got a code styling like LISP that I don't like so match
- Hot reload it's amazing
- On the same time for trial invested with Xamarin, I was not able to build the same sample case (perhaps due to the lake of DART language unknowledge)
My final judgment is that Flutter (the new la mode), for one hand seems polished, however Google insist on DART and for me it's the negative side and a waste for a technical/political decision.
Also XML interfaces allows me to visualize the all thing and it's easier to separate from the business logic.
For one side, I would like go thru Flutter but in the end I think that I would go thru Xamarin with Xamarin.Forms.
What is your experience and what do you think ?