Flutter without UI

[Mike Mitterer]

Hi, is there a way to use Flutter without it's UI part?

What I want is to use Dart/Flutter on Android but without Flutters "All inclusive"-Idea.
Android/Android Studio is really mature these days and Gradle helps to complete the positive picture.
I think the better approach would be to integrate Dart into this workflow instead of reinventing the wheel.

Writing a native UI is not really that big problem. It's the business logic behind.
It would be cool to have something like a Dart-VM in a JAR. (Without the HTML-Part)
Communication between the native part and Dart could be done via protobuf or JSON-based Message bus.
Would make it easy to implements additional functionality on both sides...

This UI-less approach has another advantage - there is no need (or very limited need) to switch between the UI-Thread and a background task.
Dart VM could run as a background service...

OK - there is iOS but I think its easier to convince the Android Devs of Dart so this should have priority.

Thanks
Mike

PS: I know I could compile Dart to JS and use the JS-Version but the transpile process is a bit annoying and
Gradle (the Dexer???) doesn't always recognize the changes so I have to "Clean and Run" in Android Studio.
Debugging the JS code is also not possible.

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[Adam Barth]

On Sat, May 14, 2016 at 9:05 AM Mike Mitterer <off...@mikemitterer.at> wrote:

Hi, is there a way to use Flutter without it's UI part?

Yes, although it might be slightly awkward.  The easiest way would be to just create a FlutterView that's one pixel wide and one pixel tall.  If you're willing to hack up and build your own engine, you can probably get it working without any graphics at all.

What I want is to use Dart/Flutter on Android but without Flutters "All inclusive"-Idea.
Android/Android Studio is really mature these days and Gradle helps to complete the positive picture.
I think the better approach would be to integrate Dart into this workflow instead of reinventing the wheel.

Yes, we agree and are working on making Flutter build that way on Android normally.

Writing a native UI is not really that big problem. It's the business logic behind.
It would be cool to have something like a Dart-VM in a JAR. (Without the HTML-Part)
Communication between the native part and Dart could be done via protobuf or JSON-based Message bus.
Would make it easy to implements additional functionality on both sides...

Yeah, we have a JSON-based message bus for FlutterView.

This UI-less approach has another advantage - there is no need (or very limited need) to switch between the UI-Thread and a background task.
Dart VM could run as a background service...

We've set up the Dart VM to run on a background thread in Flutter.  In principle, you could also run it on the main Java thread, but that didn't perform as well in our experiments.