VS Code extensions Every Flutter Developers Should Know

Mobile app development is hard and time-consuming enough for us developers to waste time on importing libraries or having to reformat a dart file manually.

In this article we’ll take a look at some VS Code extensions that can greatly improve our workflow and help us reduce the time we waste on boring and repetitive tasks that, added together, take up a lot of our time and productivity.

So without further ado, let’s get started with the first extension.

Flutter and Dart

We’re starting with an obvious but crucial one, these are the extensions you most likely already have installed when you set up your Flutter environment the first time. The Flutter extension adds support for editing, refactoring, running and reloading flutter apps.I suggest you go in the settings and enable the Dart: Preview Flutter Ui Guides option. That will make it really easy to spot the parent-child relationships in your code, which is particularly useful when you have many nested widgets in your UI files.

Another thing that this extension allows you to do is to perform multiple useful actions via a menu accessible by pressing ⌘ + . (ctrl + .) on Windows and Linux.

With regard to the Dart extension it basically adds support for the Dart programming language, syntax highlighting and code completion.

Bracket Pair Colorizer 2

In Flutter we are often dealing with a huge amount of brackets. When you start nesting widgets it can become difficult to spot bracket pairs in a quick and easy way. Look no further than Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 to improve your code readability.

Pubspec Assist

One of the main setbacks I encountered when I started working with flutter was importing and keeping packages updated. Every time I needed to update a package, I had to go to pub.dev, search for the package, go to the install tab and copy/paste a line of code. As I mentioned in the introduction to this article, we can’t afford to waste time on these things.

This is where the extension called pubspec assist comes into play. All you have to do it’s open your pubspec.yaml file, open the command palette, select “pubspec assist: add dependency” and type the name of the dependency you need. You’ll have it automatically added to your pubspec.yaml file, updated to the latest version, all without leaving vs code at all. The following gif will explain it much better.

Material Icon Theme

The theme of our IDE is often underestimated. It is not a mere aesthetic feature. It actually helps us to find files and folder way quicker. When it comes to VS Code, my theme of choice is the Material Icon Theme by Philipp Kief. It has a huge asset of colored, great looking icons.

Better comments

Commenting code is often useful to leave notes to other developers working on our team, or to our future self. I often use a lot of TODOs for reminding myself to get back on that stuff and refactor for example. Well, better comments helps me a lot. It allows us to categorize our comments based on their type. For example:

Todo tree

Speaking of TODOs, Todo Tree by Gruntfuggly is one of my favorite extensions while working, not only in flutter, but in VS Code in general. It searches for TODO and FIXME tags within your code and displays those comments in convenient Tree view in the explorer pane, allowing you to directly go to that comment when you click on it. A simple, yet so powerful extension that saves me so much time looking for todos around my code.

Color Highlight

Color highlight by Sergii Naumov helps out a lot while building the UI and storing color variables to quickly spot which color the hexadecimal value refers to. Color Highlight offers different marker types.

In the image there my marker of choice, the ‘background’. Available are also the following markers you’ll need to change in the extensions’ settings: dot-before, dot-after, foreground, outline and underline. Really neat extension for building UIs in a quicker and efficient way.

Image Preview

Image Preview by Kiss Tamás it’s especially useful for us Flutter developers. One crucial part of our apps’ experience are images. Images make the app more engaging to users. But as you may know, importing images in Flutter is kind of a pain. You have to import them in a directory, and use a path String to refer to the image every time you want to use it, intelli sense doesn’t help with it either. Image preview allows us at least to have a preview of the image we wrote the path of on the left side of the code line. Much similar as Android Studio and Intellij does for both, images and colors.

On top of that, if you hover with the mouse on the path String, the extension shows a link to get to the file in the project structure and its dimensions.

Conclusion

This concludes my picks for the top VS Code extensions for Flutter. All of these extensions, thanks to their great creators help me and many other devs out there, to get their job done in a faster and more pleasant way.

I hope you enjoyed this article and if you have more extensions you think are useful to me and other flutter devs, please write about them in a response to this article, possibly with a quick description. Let’s improve each other’s workflow!

Thanks for reading ❤

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VS Code extensions Every Flutter Developers Should Know

Destiny Volkman

1597014000

Google's Flutter 1.20 stable announced with new features - Navoki

Flutter Google cross-platform UI framework has released a new version 1.20 stable.

Flutter is Google’s UI framework to make apps for Android, iOS, Web, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Fuchsia OS. Since the last 2 years, the flutter Framework has already achieved popularity among mobile developers to develop Android and iOS apps. In the last few releases, Flutter also added the support of making web applications and desktop applications.

Last month they introduced the support of the Linux desktop app that can be distributed through Canonical Snap Store(Snapcraft), this enables the developers to publish there Linux desktop app for their users and publish on Snap Store. If you want to learn how to Publish Flutter Desktop app in Snap Store that here is the tutorial.

Flutter 1.20 Framework is built on Google’s made Dart programming language that is a cross-platform language providing native performance, new UI widgets, and other more features for the developer usage.

Here are the few key points of this release:

Performance improvements for Flutter and Dart

In this release, they have got multiple performance improvements in the Dart language itself. A new improvement is to reduce the app size in the release versions of the app. Another performance improvement is to reduce junk in the display of app animation by using the warm-up phase.

sksl_warm-up

If your app is junk information during the first run then the Skia Shading Language shader provides for pre-compilation as part of your app’s build. This can speed it up by more than 2x.

Added a better support of mouse cursors for web and desktop flutter app,. Now many widgets will show cursor on top of them or you can specify the type of supported cursor you want.

Autofill for mobile text fields

Autofill was already supported in native applications now its been added to the Flutter SDK. Now prefilled information stored by your OS can be used for autofill in the application. This feature will be available soon on the flutter web.

flutter_autofill

A new widget for interaction

InteractiveViewer is a new widget design for common interactions in your app like pan, zoom drag and drop for resizing the widget. Informations on this you can check more on this API documentation where you can try this widget on the DartPad. In this release, drag-drop has more features added like you can know precisely where the drop happened and get the position.

Updated Material Slider, RangeSlider, TimePicker, and DatePicker

In this new release, there are many pre-existing widgets that were updated to match the latest material guidelines, these updates include better interaction with Slider and RangeSlider, DatePicker with support for date range and time picker with the new style.

flutter_DatePicker

New `pubspec.yaml` format

Other than these widget updates there is some update within the project also like in pubspec.yaml file format. If you are a flutter plugin publisher then your old pubspec.yaml is no longer supported to publish a plugin as the older format does not specify for which platform plugin you are making. All existing plugin will continue to work with flutter apps but you should make a plugin update as soon as possible.

Preview of embedded Dart DevTools in Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio code flutter extension got an update in this release. You get a preview of new features where you can analyze that Dev tools in your coding workspace. Enable this feature in your vs code by _dart.previewEmbeddedDevTools_setting. Dart DevTools menu you can choose your favorite page embed on your code workspace.

Network tracking

The updated the Dev tools comes with the network page that enables network profiling. You can track the timings and other information like status and content type of your** network calls** within your app. You can also monitor gRPC traffic.

Generate type-safe platform channels for platform interop

Pigeon is a command-line tool that will generate types of safe platform channels without adding additional dependencies. With this instead of manually matching method strings on platform channel and serializing arguments, you can invoke native class and pass nonprimitive data objects by directly calling the Dartmethod.

There is still a long list of updates in the new version of Flutter 1.2 that we cannot cover in this blog. You can get more details you can visit the official site to know more. Also, you can subscribe to the Navoki newsletter to get updates on these features and upcoming new updates and lessons. In upcoming new versions, we might see more new features and improvements.

You can get more free Flutter tutorials you can follow these courses:

#dart #developers #flutter #app developed #dart devtools in visual studio code #firebase local emulator suite in flutter #flutter autofill #flutter date picker #flutter desktop linux app build and publish on snapcraft store #flutter pigeon #flutter range slider #flutter slider #flutter time picker #flutter tutorial #flutter widget #google flutter #linux #navoki #pubspec format #setup flutter desktop on windows

Monty Boehm

1675304280

How to Use Hotwire Rails

Introduction

We are back with another exciting and much-talked-about Rails tutorial on how to use Hotwire with the Rails application. This Hotwire Rails tutorial is an alternate method for building modern web applications that consume a pinch of JavaScript.

Rails 7 Hotwire is the default front-end framework shipped with Rails 7 after it was launched. It is used to represent HTML over the wire in the Rails application. Previously, we used to add a hotwire-rails gem in our gem file and then run rails hotwire: install. However, with the introduction of Rails 7, the gem got deprecated. Now, we use turbo-rails and stimulus rails directly, which work as Hotwire’s SPA-like page accelerator and Hotwire’s modest JavaScript framework.

What is Hotwire?

Hotwire is a package of different frameworks that help to build applications. It simplifies the developer’s work for writing web pages without the need to write JavaScript, and instead sending HTML code over the wire.

Introduction to The Hotwire Framework:

1. Turbo:

It uses simplified techniques to build web applications while decreasing the usage of JavaScript in the application. Turbo offers numerous handling methods for the HTML data sent over the wire and displaying the application’s data without actually loading the entire page. It helps to maintain the simplicity of web applications without destroying the single-page application experience by using the below techniques:

Turbo Frames: Turbo Frames help to load the different sections of our markup without any dependency as it divides the page into different contexts separately called frames and updates these frames individually.
Turbo Drive: Every link doesn’t have to make the entire page reload when clicked. Only the HTML contained within the tag will be displayed.
Turbo Streams: To add real-time features to the application, this technique is used. It helps to bring real-time data to the application using CRUD actions.

2. Stimulus

It represents the JavaScript framework, which is required when JS is a requirement in the application. The interaction with the HTML is possible with the help of a stimulus, as the controllers that help those interactions are written by a stimulus.

3. Strada

Not much information is available about Strada as it has not been officially released yet. However, it works with native applications, and by using HTML bridge attributes, interaction is made possible between web applications and native apps.

Simple diagrammatic representation of Hotwire Stack:

Hotwire Stack

Prerequisites For Hotwire Rails Tutorial

As we are implementing the Ruby on Rails Hotwire tutorial, make sure about the following installations before you can get started.

Ruby on Rails
Hotwire gem
PostgreSQL/SQLite (choose any one database)
Turbo Rails
Stimulus.js

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Create a new Rails Project

Find the following commands to create a rails application.

mkdir ~/projects/railshotwire
cd ~/projects/railshotwire
echo "source 'https://rubygems.org'" > Gemfile
echo "gem 'rails', '~> 7.0.0'" >> Gemfile
bundle install  
bundle exec rails new . --force -d=postgresql

Now create some files for the project, up till now no usage of Rails Hotwire can be seen.
Fire the following command in your terminal.

For creating a default controller for the application

echo "class HomeController < ApplicationController" > app/controllers/home_controller.rb
echo "end" >> app/controllers/home_controller.rb

For creating another controller for the application

echo "class OtherController < ApplicationController" > app/controllers/other_controller.rb
echo "end" >> app/controllers/home_controller.rb

For creating routes for the application

echo "Rails.application.routes.draw do" > config/routes.rb
echo '  get "home/index"' >> config/routes.rb
echo '  get "other/index"' >> config/routes.rb
echo '  root to: "home#index"' >> config/routes.rb
echo 'end' >> config/routes.rb

For creating a default view for the application

mkdir app/views/home
echo '<h1>This is Rails Hotwire homepage</h1>' > app/views/home/index.html.erb
echo '<div><%= link_to "Enter to other page", other_index_path %></div>' >> app/views/home/index.html.erb

For creating another view for the application

mkdir app/views/other
echo '<h1>This is Another page</h1>' > app/views/other/index.html.erb
echo '<div><%= link_to "Enter to home page", root_path %></div>' >> app/views/other/index.html.erb

For creating a database and schema.rb file for the application

bin/rails db:create
bin/rails db:migrate

For checking the application run bin/rails s and open your browser, your running application will have the below view.

Rails Hotwire Home Page

Additionally, you can clone the code and browse through the project. Here’s the source code of the repository: Rails 7 Hotwire application

Now, let’s see how Hotwire Rails can work its magic with various Turbo techniques.

Hotwire Rails: Turbo Drive

Go to your localhost:3000 on your web browser and right-click on the Inspect and open a Network tab of the DevTools of the browser.

Now click on go to another page link that appears on the home page to redirect from the home page to another page. In our Network tab, we can see that this action of navigation is achieved via XHR. It appears only the part inside HTML is reloaded, here neither the CSS is reloaded nor the JS is reloaded when the navigation action is performed.

Hotwire Rails Turbo Drive

By performing this action we can see that Turbo Drive helps to represent the HTML response without loading the full page and only follows redirect and reindeer HTML responses which helps to make the application faster to access.

Hotwire Rails: Turbo Frame

This technique helps to divide the current page into different sections called frames that can be updated separately independently when new data is added from the server.
Below we discuss the different use cases of Turbo frame like inline edition, sorting, searching, and filtering of data.

Let’s perform some practical actions to see the example of these use cases.

Make changes in the app/controllers/home_controller.rb file

#CODE

class HomeController < ApplicationController
   def turbo_frame_form
   end
   
   def turbo_frame submit
      extracted_anynumber = params[:any][:anynumber]
      render :turbo_frame_form, status: :ok, locals: {anynumber: extracted_anynumber,      comment: 'turbo_frame_submit ok' }
   end
end

Turbo Frame

Add app/views/home/turbo_frame_form.html.erb file to the application and add this content inside the file.

#CODE

<section>

    <%= turbo_frame_tag 'anyframe' do %>
            
      <div>
          <h2>Frame view</h2>
          <%= form_with scope: :any, url: turbo_frame_submit_path, local: true do |form| %>
              <%= form.label :anynumber, 'Type an integer (odd or even)', 'class' => 'my-0  d-inline'  %>
              <%= form.text_field :anynumber, type: 'number', 'required' => 'true', 'value' => "#{local_assigns[:anynumber] || 0}",  'aria-describedby' => 'anynumber' %>
              <%= form.submit 'Submit this number', 'id' => 'submit-number' %>
          <% end %>
      </div>
      <div>
        <h2>Data of the view</h2>
        <pre style="font-size: .7rem;"><%= JSON.pretty_generate(local_assigns) %></pre> 
      </div>
      
    <% end %>

</section>

Add the content inside file

Make some adjustments in routes.rb

#CODE

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  get 'home/index'
  get 'other/index'

  get '/home/turbo_frame_form' => 'home#turbo_frame_form', as: 'turbo_frame_form'
  post '/home/turbo_frame_submit' => 'home#turbo_frame_submit', as: 'turbo_frame_submit'


  root to: "home#index"
end

Next step is to change homepage view in app/views/home/index.html.erb

#CODE

<h1>This is Rails Hotwire home page</h1>
<div><%= link_to "Enter to other page", other_index_path %></div>

<%= turbo_frame_tag 'anyframe' do %>        
  <div>
      <h2>Home view</h2>
      <%= form_with scope: :any, url: turbo_frame_submit_path, local: true do |form| %>
          <%= form.label :anynumber, 'Type an integer (odd or even)', 'class' => 'my-0  d-inline'  %>
          <%= form.text_field :anynumber, type: 'number', 'required' => 'true', 'value' => "#{local_assigns[:anynumber] || 0}",  'aria-describedby' => 'anynumber' %>
          <%= form.submit 'Submit this number', 'id' => 'submit-number' %>
      <% end %>
  <div>
<% end %>

Change HomePage

After making all the changes, restart the rails server and refresh the browser, the default view will appear on the browser.

restart the rails server Now in the field enter any digit, after entering the digit click on submit button, and as the submit button is clicked we can see the Turbo Frame in action in the below screen, we can observe that the frame part changed, the first title and first link didn’t move.

Hotwire Rails: Turbo Streams

Turbo Streams deliver page updates over WebSocket, SSE or in response to form submissions by only using HTML and a series of CRUD-like operations, you are free to say that either

Update the piece of HTML while responding to all the other actions like the post, put, patch, and delete except the GET action.
Transmit a change to all users, without reloading the browser page.

This transmit can be represented by a simple example.

Make changes in app/controllers/other_controller.rb file of rails application

#CODE

class OtherController < ApplicationController

  def post_something
    respond_to do |format|
      format.turbo_stream {  }
    end
  end

   end

file of rails application

Add the below line in routes.rb file of the application

#CODE

post '/other/post_something' => 'other#post_something', as: 'post_something'

Superb! Rails will now attempt to locate the app/views/other/post_something.turbo_stream.erb template at any moment the ‘/other/post_something’ endpoint is reached.

For this, we need to add app/views/other/post_something.turbo_stream.erb template in the rails application.

#CODE

<turbo-stream action="append" target="messages">
  <template>
    <div id="message_1">This changes the existing message!</div>
  </template>
</turbo-stream>

This states that the response will try to append the template of the turbo frame with ID “messages”.

Now change the index.html.erb file in app/views/other paths with the below content.

#CODE

<h1>This is Another page</h1>
<div><%= link_to "Enter to home page", root_path %></div>

<div style="margin-top: 3rem;">
  <%= form_with scope: :any, url: post_something_path do |form| %>
      <%= form.submit 'Post any message %>
  <% end %>
  <turbo-frame id="messages">
    <div>An empty message</div>
  </turbo-frame>
</div>

After making all the changes, restart the rails server and refresh the browser, and go to the other page.

go to the other page

Once the above screen appears, click on the Post any message button

This action shows that after submitting the response, the Turbo Streams help the developer to append the message, without reloading the page.

Another use case we can test is that rather than appending the message, the developer replaces the message. For that, we need to change the content of app/views/other/post_something.turbo_stream.erb template file and change the value of the action attribute from append to replace and check the changes in the browser.

#CODE

<turbo-stream action="replace" target="messages">
  <template>
    <div id="message_1">This changes the existing message!</div>
  </template>
</turbo-stream>

change the value of the action attribute When we click on Post any message button, the message that appear below that button will get replaced with the message that is mentioned in the app/views/other/post_something.turbo_stream.erb template

Stimulus

There are some cases in an application where JS is needed, therefore to cover those scenarios we require Hotwire JS tool. Hotwire has a JS tool because in some scenarios Turbo-* tools are not sufficient. But as we know that Hotwire is used to reduce the usage of JS in an application, Stimulus considers HTML as the single source of truth. Consider the case where we have to give elements on a page some JavaScript attributes, such as data controller, data-action, and data target. For that, a stimulus controller that can access elements and receive events based on those characteristics will be created.

Make a change in app/views/other/index.html.erb template file in rails application

#CODE

<h1>This is Another page</h1>
<div><%= link_to "Enter to home page", root_path %></div>

<div style="margin-top: 2rem;">
  <%= form_with scope: :any, url: post_something_path do |form| %>
      <%= form.submit 'Post something' %>
  <% end %>
  <turbo-frame id="messages">
    <div>An empty message</div>
  </turbo-frame>
</div>

<div style="margin-top: 2rem;">
  <h2>Stimulus</h2>  
  <div data-controller="hello">
    <input data-hello-target="name" type="text">
    <button data-action="click->hello#greet">
      Greet
    </button>
    <span data-hello-target="output">
    </span>
  </div>
</div>

Make A change Make changes in the hello_controller.js in path app/JavaScript/controllers and add a stimulus controller in the file, which helps to bring the HTML into life.

#CODE

import { Controller } from "@hotwired/stimulus"

export default class extends Controller {
  static targets = [ "name", "output" ]

  greet() {
    this.outputTarget.textContent =
      `Hello, ${this.nameTarget.value}!`
  }
}

add a stimulus controller in the file Go to your browser after making the changes in the code and click on Enter to other page link which will navigate to the localhost:3000/other/index page there you can see the changes implemented by the stimulus controller that is designed to augment your HTML with just enough behavior to make it more responsive.

With just a little bit of work, Turbo and Stimulus together offer a complete answer for applications that are quick and compelling.

Using Rails 7 Hotwire helps to load the pages at a faster speed and allows you to render templates on the server, where you have access to your whole domain model. It is a productive development experience in ROR, without compromising any of the speed or responsiveness associated with SPA.

Conclusion

We hope you were satisfied with our Rails Hotwire tutorial. Write to us at service@bacancy.com for any query that you want to resolve, or if you want us to share a tutorial on your query.

For more such solutions on RoR, check out our Ruby on Rails Tutorials. We will always strive to amaze you and cater to your needs.

Original article source at: https://www.bacancytechnology.com/

#rails #ruby

hourly developer

1598336804

Hire Flutter Developer

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Idrish Dhankot

1622532470

Hire Dedicated Flutter App Developer USA| Flutter App Developers

Hire Flutter App Developers: WebClues Infotech is a Flutter App Development company. Our Flutter mobile app development team can create cross-platform apps for different industry verticals. Our Flutter developers will help you extend your business’s scope by developing enhanced functionality and a feature-rich app. To provide a rich user experience to your users, hire dedicated Flutter app developers from WebClues Infotech today!

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WebClues Infotech

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Hire Dedicated Flutter Developer - WebClues Infotech

Cross-Platform app development is taking the mobile app development industry by a storm by reducing the development cost as well as complication. The forefront technology driving this growth is Flutter for mobile app development.

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VS Code extensions Every Flutter Developers Should Know

Flutter and Dart

Bracket Pair Colorizer 2

Pubspec Assist

Material Icon Theme

Better comments

Todo tree

Color Highlight

Image Preview

Conclusion

Further reading

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

Google's Flutter 1.20 stable announced with new features - Navoki

Performance improvements for Flutter and Dart

Autofill for mobile text fields

Updated Material Slider, RangeSlider, TimePicker, and DatePicker

New pubspec.yaml format

Preview of embedded Dart DevTools in Visual Studio Code

Network tracking

Generate type-safe platform channels for platform interop

How to Use Hotwire Rails

Introduction

What is Hotwire?

1. Turbo:

2. Stimulus

3. Strada

Prerequisites For Hotwire Rails Tutorial

Create a new Rails Project

Hotwire Rails: Turbo Drive

Hotwire Rails: Turbo Frame

Hotwire Rails: Turbo Streams

Stimulus

Conclusion

Hire Flutter Developer

Hire Dedicated Flutter App Developer USA| Flutter App Developers

Hire Dedicated Flutter Developer - WebClues Infotech

New `pubspec.yaml` format