shark

Shark Flutter 🦈 (Official)

A Flutter server rendering framework

What it is

Shark is a server rendering framework, a server-driven UI framework.

Simple use case of shark

Let say you have a text widget, you specify it as json on the server return to the client, the client use shark to receive the text widget and show the UI successfully.

After a while, you want to change the text widget to a button, instead of modify it on the client code and go through all the mobile app store updating process, you only need to modify the text widget to a button widget on the server, and the shark client received it, showed the newest UI.

Project diagram

Guide

• Set Up
• Routing
• Event
• Caching
• Parsing
• Localization
• Other
• Real World Sample

How to use

First, init Shark library on main method on your application

  void main() {
    WidgetsFlutterBinding.ensureInitialized();
    await Shark.init(hostUrl: 'http://yourhost.com');

    runApp(MyApp());
  }

Second, set up UI widget

• To be noticed, every thing related to widget is controlled by SharkController
• fromUrl method would send a REST api request to your server, which indicates the path from your current url.
• get method is where we send the request

  late final SharkController _controller;

  /// init the shark controller
  @override
  void initState() {
    _controller = SharkController.fromUrl(path: '/container',)..get();
    super.initState();
  }

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return SharkWidget(controller: _controller);
  }

To redirect to another page, call redirect

_controller.redirect('/your_new_path');

To refresh current page, call refresh

_controller.refresh();

If you want to create your own parser

class MyCustomParser extends SharkParser {}

Routing

shark auto handles your page routing, if you do not want it, set handleClickEvent to false

 _sharkController = SharkController('/your_path', handleClickEvent: false);

Click Event

Routing trigger by click event, which you can set it like this on your json widget file.

A sample event json format

    {
        "type": "container",
        "click_event": "route://your_path?xxx=xxx"
    }

• schema: $yourschema://

• path: your_path

• argument: After the prefix '?' is the argument field. xxx=xxx, separate with &

sample:

"click_event": "route://second_page?name=hello&place=world"  

The schema represents the routing action

Currently, there are 4 routing action

route: prefix with route://, internally would call Navigator.pushName('new_path', args)

Push a new route to Navigator

** Please remember to specify route path on your route map

   MaterialApp(
     onGenerateRoute: (RouteSettings settings) {
        String routePath = settings.name?.toString() ?? '';
        if (baseRoute.containsKey(routePath)) {
          return MaterialPageRoute(
              settings: settings, builder: your_route_table[routeName]!);
        } else
          return null;
      },
     home: $yourhomepage,
   ),
  

• pop: prefix with pop://, internally would call Navigator.pop(result)

• redirect: prefix with redirect://, redirect current page with the following path

• link: use url_launcher internally to open a url on browser, please visit url_launcher to configure the detail requirements for each platform

Caching

Shark use dio_cache_interceptor for caching purposes.

When you initialize the shark library, you can pass a cacheStrategy argument to config your caching setting.

Parsing

Note that Shark uses dynamic_widget for widget parsing,

If you want to create your own parser

class MyCustomParser extends SharkParser {}

Then add this new parser to shark widget

_sharkController.addParser(MyCustomParser());

To view the json format, go visit [documentation](https://github.com/dengyin2000/dynamic_widget/blob/master/WIDGETS.md) on dynamic_widget.

Localization

shark uses easy_localization for localization, follow the instructions to set up.

After setting up easy_localization package, next thing you need to do is to add a TranslatedTextParser to shark widget

TranslatedTextParser do all the localize work for you

_sharkController.addParse(TranslatedTextParser());

In your server json file, modify the text tag to translatedText

{
    "type": "Text",
    "data": "Redirect To next page"
}

To

{
    "type": "TranslatedText",
    "data": "Redirect To next page"
}

data value should be the value corresponds to your translations json file key

sample translations file zh.json

{
  "Navigate To next page":"push路由，转入下一页",
  "Redirect To next page": "转换至另一页",
  "To goog.gl": "去谷歌"
}

That's it ~~

OTHER

You can also view the express server sample, you can deploy to heroku fast

or you can test it on this temporary host =(little slow)

https://shark-sample-server.herokuapp.com/

Real world sample

(Promotion 😂)

My new meditation app had implemented shark recently, the profile page is handled by shark completely.

https://seasonnatural.netlify.app/

My work email : lauchuen94@gmail.com