Bachelor Thesis BCLR-2021-14

BibliographyMüller, Elias: Web technologies on the desktop: an early look at Flutter.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology, Bachelor Thesis No. 14 (2021).
63 pages, english.
Abstract

Academic research into cross-platform desktop application frameworks has been fairly limited in recent years due to a lack of innovation within the sector. Businesses and companies prioritise the development of Web applications, or even mobile applications. Flutter is a relatively new tool-kit from Google which allows the development of mobile, Web and desktop applications from a single code base. With Flutter desktop reaching beta stage, we explored the tool-kit on the desktop. We did this by first designing a basic application which we then implemented twice using Flutter and Electron - a competing framework. We automated the operation of these applications, and we recorded system information such as CPU, GPU, and memory usage. Lastly, we considered Flutter’s desktop features. Although we encountered some issues during development, the development process with Flutter was nonetheless faster and required about 30% less code. However, our recorded usage statistics highlighted that this product is still very much in its beta stages. Our Flutter application took significantly longer to complete one of our tasks in release mode than in development mode, with CPU usage being constantly above 10% while GPU usage was above 40%. Furthermore, Flutter is still missing some features such as support for multiple windows per application or customizable context menus. Based on our results, we cannot recommend Flutter for productive use on the desktop yet. However, the framework shows great potential.

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Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Architecture of Application Systems
Superviser(s)Aiello, Prof. Marco
Entry dateJune 2, 2021
   Publ. Computer Science