What is Flutter? Video Lecture | Coffee with a Googler - IT & Software

[Music]
so Eric welcome to coffee with a Googler
tell us all about yourself yeah so I've
been at Google for like a decade now Wow
mostly working on the web okay until
about three years ago when I helped
start the flutter project okay which is
now what I work on and yeah I've been
writing code most of that time although
a couple years into flutter I switched
from coding all day to know I leave the
engineering team so what's it like
changing from coding all day to being an
engineering manager remembering that our
audience are primarily developers so
it's been a while right um mostly
because footers just been exploding um
usage inside and now outside Google um
and that's been fun and it's fun to just
you know help people get stuff done
right now you've had a background in a
lot of web and particularly rendering
right and how has that helped you with
her building flutter yeah so I've worked
on rendering systems for you know 10 15
years now again mostly on the web and
that's sort of how we ended up starting
flutter no problem is that we you know I
I feel like that's where my leverage is
I like that expression where my leverage
is I have to remember that one yeah we
just you know wanted to do something
better for Mol how did flutter start
well that's a bit of a story um my
favorite kind so I used to work on
Chrome ok um and I was on the chrome
team at the time and we were working
with some some hard problems trying to
get certain parts of the web to really
you know be nice and smooth um and for
whatever reason we did this experiment
for a couple weeks
ok where we decided it was gonna be ok
to break compatibility at the web ok and
we thankfully it was owning an
experiment oh just an experiment but
with that restriction removed we just
started removing things all these old
compatibility supports for all these
obscure websites that you know right the
vast majority of us never go - yeah oh
maybe they don't even exist anymore yeah
because it evolves rapidly and we just
kept removing and rooming or moving and
at the end of a couple of weeks we ran
our benchmarks again and obviously this
wasn't quite the web anymore right
mana trend all the web but it was 20
times faster Wow on some of the
benchmarks we cared about and we're like
there's something here right and so we
we kept digging and that from that we
started and you know probably took us
about another year okay I'm taking
before we realize we just need to write
a whole new thing so it's like now tell
me what flutter is what is it all about
that there's a lot of misunderstandings
and misconceptions and I know I've had
many of them so you know assume I know
nothing which is a pretty safe
assumption so uh you know tell me about
flutter what is it this a flutter is a
way to write for ios and android okay
from a single codebase okay and we try
to make that fast and easy and we do we
make a bunch of choices in that space
too to try and do some awesome things
there for example like we flutters a
full stack we talk all the way down to
the GPU and CPU talks straight to the
hardware we made a bunch of choices
early on around making custom very easy
so we have a very layered approach you
can take as little or as much as you
want and then finally the third thing we
we have a bunch of investment in tooling
okay so that's part of how we make
development fast we have things like a
developer cycle that's less than a
second less than a second from so for
when I save my codes actually running it
yeah like running on the device um how
does that work well so obviously we have
to use though the iOS and Android tools
to get the code onto the device in the
first place but once it's there then
yeah you just edit your code and you hit
save and we have this thing called hot
reload okay where we inject the new code
into the running flutter' system okay
and yeah it just updates you don't
restart your app you don't change your
place in the app the just code changes
nice I mean I've been a mobile developer
for a while so building on various
mobile platforms and it's always like
compile deploy wait for it to boot up
wait for it to execute wait for the
debugger to start only to find out I
left out a semicolon or something like
that so and that can be minutes in some
cases right with some images so by
cutting that to a second what what kind
of things are you seeing the impact that
has oh it's just totally changed the way
we see people develop inside Google you
know those who use flutter some teams
we've seen just literally sit with their
designers
and they talk about painting their app
to life we had you know one of our
founding presses Bob Ross says you say
that totally lots of little trees but
the you watch these teams and again they
just they just constantly hot reload hot
reload hot reload hot reload and their
their app just comes to life Wow so now
that kind of iteration is made possible
by the fact that you have dart as the
programming languages go right that's
right
we do use a programming language that
hasn't seen a lot of usage outside
Google yet but actually gets quite a bit
of usage inside Google and that's called
Dart
and we're the first mobile adaptation of
dart and dart gives us things like this
hot reload now one of the confusions
that I often hear that particularly when
we say hey we have a platform for
building for multiple devices is that
it's a thin veneer over a web platform
but flutter is something very different
not at all that's right yeah so flutter
again we go straight to the metal we
have a custom runtime that we've built
from the ground up and we use some sort
of best in breed technologies from the
rest of Google like we use skia which is
this rendering technology that's used in
chrome and Android and a few other
places and we use the text rendering
system where parts of the text rendering
system from Android okay and then we
also use of course dart this is the
start runtime so what does like a
flutter application look like I assume
I'm not compiling a dot app or a dot apk
and what so what will it look like if
I'm going to iOS are going to Android so
actually you are really so a flutter
application is just an iOS app or just
an Android app okay flutter provides
actually a view a flutter view and most
people use those fullscreen and then we
paint every single pixel you see on the
screen but you can use flutter of you
just alongside all the rest of your
Android views or your iOS views so yeah
you retain full control and you can
write as much java or as much collin
okay you know or as much swift during as
much objective-c
in the rest of your application and then
share as much as you want
between nice with flutter so even if I
have an existing app I can start then
improving that using flutter that's
right it doesn't have to be a you don't
have to start greenfield nice and one of
the things I noticed when I was like
browsing the flutter website is that
there's a whole bunch of controls as
well right
so that these look and I was wondering
if that lead system maybe some of the
web confusion because they're very web
like controls that you can have as
add-ons to flutter so so some of that
comes from the inspiration from the web
so a lot of my team started on the web I
used to work on the web for many years
our current tech lead for example wrote
the html5 spec your tech lead right yeah
ok so there's some roots in the web
definitely but yeah so we do have share
some of the same nouns and verbs you
know as the web does like we have
something called flexbox and so it
should feel very familiar to people
coming from the web but it is not the
web but the technology core is not the
web so it really feels like a best of
both we hope so yeah that's good so say
I'm a developer and I'm either a mobile
web developer building native apps in
iOS objective-c Swift or an Android and
Java Kotlin or maybe I'm a mobile web
developer what advice would you give me
and how to get started and how to get
productive really quickly with sure so
obviously all our Doc's start at Florida
io that's our domain but there's also a
ton of YouTube content out there ok
people doing tutorials is one of the
other things I know you've just released
the beta that's right just this last
week we announced beta at Mobile World
Congress we're now starting to ship
regular betas that we've vetted further
so they're nice and stable for your
usage cool and even though you've been
in alpha and just gonna into beta I know
lots of people have been using flutter
and lots of apps have been built with
flutter you have any particular
favorites so the biggest name that folks
know is that the Hamilton for the
Hamilton musical know that app was
written in flutter last year I'm a total
fan of that musical I'm gonna start
singing it in a moment now that you've
mentioned that the song is going out of
my head stuff and Google has released a
few apps and there's a few more on the
way and the community again is just
starting to explode we've seen hundreds
of apps already launched to the Play
Store and again lots more in Paris right
now I know you've had some really fun
scenarios of things that people have
done with flutter right I'd heard of
like what was it some designers taking a
look at award-winning designs and then
redoing them so I know that I know the
story you're talking about but yeah one
of the fun things that we see with
flutter is that
we have as a founding principle that you
should never have to say no to your
designer right you should be able to do
anything the phone can do anything your
designer might want to envision and so
we see people testing this and they go
to these design websites and they find
you know the winning design of that day
or the winning design of that month and
they're like can I do that and most of
these designs have never been done
before never been implement for iOS
never been in for Android and they do in
footer and one person in particular in
Spain Sergey of surgery other place it's
not our Sergey Sergey and did like a
tutorial series where he took one of
these and built it up and it's just neat
to see people do that
Oh so again if I want to get started
it's flutter die oh that's right and the
bait is now available so if even if I
had've if you're my developer who's
played with flutter before and maybe it
wasn't for me because it was in an alpha
that'd be good to try the beta that's
right okay so flutter dot IO download
the tools and get started
cool so well thank you Eric that's been
a lot of fun and thanks everybody for
watching this episode of coffee with a
Googler if you have any questions for me
or if you have any questions for Eric
and if you want to know more about
flutter please just leave them in the
comments below thank you so much