lob-openapi VS Flutter

Lob was started by two developers who needed to solve a problem, and direct mail APIs were the answer; the goal was to make sending mail just as easy as sending an email. This is a fun personal use case, but Lob is meant to automate direct mail—postcards, letters, checks, self-mailers, and more—at scale. Just like email, each mailpiece can be highly personalized, and for advanced tiers, Mail Analytics is available for each mailpiece to track each postcard along its journey to delivery (and if you included a QR code, you could even track open rate). Check out Lob.com if you want to learn more.

An example of a populated JSON Body could look something like the following. (You can find more information on each of these fields in Lob’s API documentation.)

*To learn more about Lob, visit our developer portal; you can create an account and snag your API keys to try at no cost. You can also dive into our API docs here.

To demonstrate our point, we built a website for a fictitious real estate company displaying information and photos of agents as well as properties for sale. We extended the website by adding a form for the real estate marketing team to use. They could select agents and properties, as well as customize the headline, fonts, and colors—then preview the postcard. All of this was powered by Strapi on the backend and Lob’s direct mail APIs.

Clever uses of a Lob API included an integration with Modzy to analyze the sentiment of letters created with Lob, another built a health care website that included the ability to use the Lob API to mail well wishes to loved ones. The winner, Cali-Eco, built a website to educate visitors about environmental issues, and integrated the Lob API to send out custom postcards about relevant issues to users. On the frontend they used Figma for the rough draft of the website template, NicePage for the building blocks of the final draft site, and VSCode to edit the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery. Backend technologies included Python, Flask—and the Lob API.

The form only captures the essential parameters the Lob Print & Mail API requires for sending checks. You can check out Lob’s documentation for optional parameters to customize the form further.

The presentation layers available to headless CMSs need not be digital. For example, with Lob’s Automated Direct Mail Platform, your headless CMS can use print mail as a presentation layer as easily as it sends emails. Lob APIs are widely available, continuously updated, and scalable. Print mail is one of two primary services Lob APIs offer, the other being address verification for US and international locations.

Lob’s API specification is a multifile spec organized semantically, by resource, instead of syntactically, by OpenAPI element. Organizing the spec semantically reduces cognitive friction, helping developers reason from interaction (endpoints) to data (and process) design.

Deploying Dart functions to AWS Lambda enables you to utilize them not only within AWS Lambda but also integrate them with services like Amazon API Gateway, allowing you to leverage them in Flutter applications as well. This unified codebase in Dart offers great convenience.

[3]: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/tree/master/packages/flut...

Thanks - that link does not appear to be open access, anyways I don't think I've seen it. I'm familiar with Flutter at a high-level (Kevin Moore gave a great talk on it at Wasm I/O), and I think other than requiring users to work in Dart, it is probably one of the most powerful ways to do cross-platform UI today.

Worth noting that their original GPU backend was Skia, and now they are retooling around Flutter GPU (Impeller)[0], which is kind of designed similarly as an abstract rendering interface over platform-specific GPU APIs.

[0]https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Flutter-GPU

If you are considering Electron/React then I would suggest adding Flutter to your list of technologies to consider. It uses Dart (a language similar to C#) and has a lot going for it… relatively quick to get up to speed with, fantastic developer experience (e.g., hot reload, great IDE support, good development tools) and very strong cross-platform support: it generates native iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows and Linux executables. Check it out: https://flutter.dev/

You can find the React Native documentation here and Flutter Documentation here.

[1]https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/55092#issuecomment...