Flutter Mobile App with Azure Backend - John McFetridge

6-6:30 Social
6:30 - 8pm Presentation

This talk is intended as an introduction to the exciting new platform from Google called Flutter. John is semi-retired and likes to play with new technologies as “brain-candy” and thinks flutter is pretty interesting new entry into the cross platform app ecosystem. He will share with you some of his experiences in building a fitness machine app that uses Azure services for the backend. The talk will focus on Flutter and its language Dart. He will briefly tour Dart then jump into the fitness app that he is building for fun (and maybe more). John will show us how easy it is to build apps without a design tool as there is nothing like VS Designer or XCode.

What is Flutter?
Flutter is a mobile app SDK for building high-performance, high-fidelity, apps for iOS and Android, from a single codebase much like Xamarin, ReactJS and Sencha touch. The goal is to enable developers to deliver high-performance apps that feel natural on different platforms. The language is called Dart and if you are a C# developer then the learning curve is minimal, just a couple of hours.

Some references:
https://flutter.io/docs/resources/technical-overview
https://youtu.be/REJDzio_h7o

John gives a new definition to the term senior developer as he has over 40 years experience in writing code, starting with assembly on IBM mainframe (great start), thru C family including Swift and now Dart. He started a software dev company in 80’s that listed on Nasdaq and was a member of original dev team that produced CorelDraw. After these successes there were a few minor successes and outright failures. The last few years have been working on Windows app for introducing quality control to a primitive business, dry cleaning. He does that on a part-time basis so John spends his free time experiment in everything from IOS to Xamarin, Sencha Touch and now Flutter. He is new to Sarasota area as he just relocated here last fall from Gainesville.