Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Flutter + Python = Flet

Flet is this pretty cool framework that allows someone to build an app on web, mobile and desktop quickly. It uses the Flutter framework for the UI stuff to get it to look good and work on any platform. 

It says that its language agnostic but it currently only supports Python. Does that make it a Python framework?

Anyway, I've been playing around with it and I like it. 

Things that I like:

1. Good looking apps created quickly

2. Everything is in Python even the UI; quite similar how Flutter does it, in fact. 

3. Next-to-nothing code change to target different platforms; so, to get a desktop app to run on a web browser is a just a named function parameter

flet.app(target=main) # run it as a desktop
flet.app(target=main, view=flet.WEB_BROWSER) # run it on a web browser/web app

Things that's missing:

1. No hot reload (but it's on the roadmap so that's something to look forward to)

2. Not all of the Flutter widgets are available like the Hero widget


Overall, I'm having a grand old time trying out Flet.