Flutter is an open source framework for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase.

• Read the Flutter docs

ClojureDart is a recent Clojure dialect to make native mobile and desktop apps using Flutter and the Dart ecosystem.

• Read the ClojureDart quick start
• Read the ClojureDart + Flutter quick start

Developing a Flutter app with ClojureDart involves installing Java, Clojure, Android Studio, XCode (on Mac), and finally Flutter. Mobile development is complex and requires large, complex toolchains.

• Windows (use choco)
• Linux (use asdf)
• MacOS (use brew)

…then follow the ClojureDart Flutter quickstart.

When evaluating cross-platform mobile app development systems for a side project, I had an eye out for three key features to keep my sanity:

1. A short and simple toolchain
2. Easy to access and develop with hardware features (bluetooth)
3. Leverage my existing React knowledge

After evaluating React Native (+ClojureScript) and Flutter (+ClojureDart) it became abundantly clear that Flutter had a much shorter and more stable toolchain, significantly less complex dependency management (JS can be hellish, things break often) and a more consistent experience across platforms.

At first glance, Flutter with ClojureDart seems to be a vastly superior way for a solo dev to develop mobile apps. Time will tell if this is true or a large misstep.

To reduce the lines of code required to produce a mobile app. Luckily the DartClojure project exists to convert dart code to ClojureDart, it's built into Calva, and the dartclojure.el Emacs package exists to facilitate easy use.

These are rough, personal notes - read with caution.

• Every Flutter app must start with runApp().
• There is void main(){} to start the app.
• The runApp function accepts a widget tree. There is no GUI UI builder - everything is done in code. Hooray!

import 'package:flutter/material.dart';

void main(){
  runApp(MaterialApp());
}

• Instructors are using screencast mode in VS Code to help observers
• Flutter has pubspec.lock which holds package info and dependencies

Here's an extremely basic hello world in dart:

import 'package:flutter/material.dart';

void main() {
  runApp(
    const MaterialApp(
      home: Scaffold(
        backgroundColor: Colors.deepPurple,
        body: Text('Hello World!'))));
}

Hit debug in VS Code to run the app.

Here's the exact equivalent in clojure-dart:

(ns acme.main
  (:require ["package:flutter/material.dart" :as m]
            [cljd.flutter :as f]))

(defn main []
  (f/run
   (m/MaterialApp
    .title "Welcome to Flutter")
    .home
    (m/Scaffold .backgroundColor m.Colors/deepPurple)
    .body
    (m/Text "Let's get coding! Yahoo!")))

Run clj -M:cljd flutter to run the app.

See main.cljd in the test project. Hopefully this makes it clear how named arguments are represented in ClojureDart versus plain Dart.

A little more example:

(ns acme.main
  (:require ["package:flutter/material.dart" :as m]
            [cljd.flutter :as f]))

;; clj -M:cljd flutter

(defn main []
  (f/run
   (m/MaterialApp .title "Welcome to Flutter")
    .home
    (m/Scaffold .backgroundColor m.Colors/deepPurple)
    .body
    (m/Container
      .decoration (m/BoxDecoration
                    .gradient (m/LinearGradient
                                .colors [m.Colors/red m.Colors/white]
                                .begin m.Alignment/topLeft)))
    (m/Center)
    (m/Container .decoration (m/BoxDecoration .color m.Colors/red))
    (m/Text "Let's get coding! Yahoo!")))