Farewell Node.js, hello Flutter!

[V3ntus]

Development has officially halted for Node.js/Electron builds of Darvester Gen2

_{thank goodness}

The previous gen2 branch was in desperate need of a rewrite, but Node.js and Electron made it so painful. node_modules became too large, packaged builds were oversized (150MB for a simple app like Darvester is unrealistic). It was time to move to a different build system. Introduce Flutter.

Flutter is not only cross-platform like Electron, but also compiles to native, machine code (plus Javascript for web which is a neat addition). This makes it much faster and smaller than an Electron desktop application as it does not need to pack a webview (Chromium) as well as an incessant amount of Javascript modules.

I also considered React Native, but this is a good project to start learning a new language (RN uses Javascript which then compiles to native code). Flutter uses Google's Dart language, which is a neat hybrid of Java, but it's not Java and that makes me very happy.

What will change?

Not a whole lot. The biggest change is:

UI

Frontend overhaul woo hoo! I still doubt my frontend skills highly, but you can agree this looks so much better than the previous iteration. Yucky. What was I thinking?

Size

I built a Windows binary the other day. 12MB. That was it.

Functionality

Plans for Darvester Gen2 will remain the same. I hope to see this application still become a all-in-one bundle. Right now, I am focusing on the presentation portion of this. As of the time I'm writing this, I have completed views for Guilds, Guild, and Users.

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Anyways. If you would like to contribute, well uh. I'm sorry you have to read my code. Discussion threads are welcome though!