Choosing the right framework for the task at hand should largely be driven by the constraints of the task, skill, and time i.e., we need to answer the following questions:
- What is the task? Is this the right tool for the task?
- What is the skill set of the developer working on the task?
- How long is the development time for v1?
- What does future development look like?
When it comes to choosing the right web framework to build your web app, we have many options React, Vue, Angular, Flutter, etc… the list goes on.
Now, for cross-platform app development, there are largely only two options that have both high adoption and active development: Flutter and React Native
At Pauze we came up with the following answers to these questions:
- Build a web app that shows weight-neutral healthcare providers per state in the US (simple use case that most web frameworks can help with)
- Developers have Strong backend development (using Java) but beginner-intermediate experience building web apps and are fairly productive in React and Flutter ecosystems
- 1 week
- The ecosystem has rich libraries and supports cross-platform development
Based on the answers above we have reduced our choices to Flutter and React Native.
We chose to go with Flutter as it uses the Dart language which is strongly typed, easy to learn, and fits the current skill set of the developers, also Dart lang looks and feels a lot like Java in some of its features.
So far we are very happy with our choice, we were able to release the first version of Mindfully in 4 days!
