flutter-elinux VS compose-multiplatform

Flutter, for sure. It feels like a much more thoughtful system overall. I'm not as impressed with the Dart ecosystem as I am with the Flutter one, mostly because the Dart ecosystem lacks widely used/supported frameworks for server-side development. I would LOVE to completely remove Javascript from my life and if there were a solid server-side framework for Dart, I could use it literally everywhere.

Re your problems:

1. Yeah, break widgets down. Yes, it's more work, but it's necessary in the same way that breaking code down into smaller functions is necessary. You don't just cram everything into one file and you shouldn't expect that a mega-widget will be the right way either.

2. Flutter for web is still very early on. You should know that there are two renderers (one that uses canvas and one that uses real dom elements), but they're both just "okay" at this point. They have been rapidly improving however -- the difference between now and this time last year is significant. It'll keep getting better and in the mean time, it's usable enough. The download sizes are huge and sometimes rendering can be a little janky, but again: it'll get better. For me, the promise of a unified system for desktop, web, mobile, and even some limited 3rd party embedded Linux support (https://github.com/sony/flutter-elinux) is really appealing.

So, to add file associations, we need to be able to pass both the .properties file and the --file-associations option. At the time of writing this article, the org.jetbrains.compose plugin doesn't provide such a mechanism. There is an open issue on GitHub that describes a possible workaround, which, unfortunately seems to not work on macOS.

JetBrains has a simplified example of a general-purpose Compose text viewer here: https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-multiplatform/blob/master/examples/codeviewer/shared/src/commonMain/kotlin/org/jetbrains/codeviewer/ui/editor/Editor.kt


Compose for desktop has a scrollbar component available. You probably can't use that directly on Android, but you could probably steal most of its code.

My company uses https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-multiplatform to make a desktop app in Kotlin. It's amazing and fantastic. It's basically as mature as using Kotlin in an Android app.

Kamel is an asynchronous media loading library for Compose Multiplatform.

Kotlin Compose Multiplatform is the way to do Desktop apps. https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-multiplatform

As for missing controls, a common one is a grid. They have built in grids, but again they are built for Android and don't make any sense in a desktop app. There is no simple way to create an Excel-like Data Grid like you might see in Windows Forms, although it can be done. https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-multiplatform/issues/344.