Food Trust platform was kinda a greenfield project so we could choose from less popular to cutting-edge technologies to achieve our POC goals.
Portal
We designed the portal as a web application for different roles of users. When it comes to web application today, if I didn’t have React experience it still would be a good option. We use the most popular scaffolding tool create-react-app (backed by Facebook) and state management library react-redux (The co-author is working at Facebook). Also personally I’m a fan of Google material design so we use a themed MDC React.
They are all documented and maintained well so work together well. Some small issues I encountered were related to MDC React. Because its components are distributed separately and get updated/upgraded a bit frequently (to follow the main repo), dependencies conflicts may happen. To resolve that, you need to install the latest dependencies manually by running npm install for each component.
Mobile apps
Before I joined the team I had some experience in Flutter. Initially, I tried it just because Google built it and then I like its performance, single codebase and of course, built-in Material design components.
You have to write in Dart though they provide a short and useful guide to give you a basic idea about how to achieve some simple tasks if your background is web development.
However, we didn’t go with Flutter eventually as there were some requirements we couldn’t simply achieve like AR view (We tried ARCore but its image recognizer didn’t fit ).
Flutter is great, especially 1.5 released early this month. From now on, Flutter single codebase covers iOS, Android and Browsers and it looks like Google Dart’s ambition may come back.
At the current stage, we have the Portal and a couple of Android phone apps, later we may have some kiosk apps or investigate Flutter more.
