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How to Create a Chat App With Backendless SDK for Flutter

In this article, we are going to demonstrate how to create a simple peer-to-peer (p2p) chat application with the Backendless SDK for Flutter. This will give you an overview of the process needed to integrate your Backendless server-side with your Flutter chat app client-side.

Flutter is a popular hybrid frontend framework for mobile and web app development. With the Backendless SDK for Flutter, Backendless is easily integrated as a powerful Codeless backend and real-time database for any Flutter app.

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Are We Wasting Our Time Writing UIs?

A huge focus and time suck in the last 3 years has been how do I write a better UI, what is the user experience, how do I relate to the user via a screen with text, colorful shapes, and maintain the brand? Many companies have launched initiatives to make the software user interface more usable, aligning the user to the business process. All of these efforts are backed up with some ROI. The density of data presented on a page is changing, UI designers and User Experience teams are monitoring and trying to figure out how to get just the right data on a screen and make sure that there are not too many steps to complete a task. This is a long and never-ending road.

Looking back is it really working? Are users happier with the new UI? From what I am seeing no, users cling to old UI’s for ERP packages like Oracle and SAP, they are afraid to upgrade because they have to retrain the user on the new UI.  Teaching people how to use an application and system is a daunting task. Even if the new SAP Fiori experience is better and role-based vs task-oriented, people still need to be trained on the UI, trained on the role, trained on the workflow, and people have to change what they are doing and learn something new and different.

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Build a Simple Chat App Using Java and Stateful Web Agents

Even the most simple chat user interfaces bely a world of architectural complexity. Features like authentication, user presence, chat rooms, user counts, message encryption, and countless others represent a significant undertaking. However, with the right tools, building an enterprise-scale chat application is not only possible, it can be done relatively quickly.

This post is a tutorial for building a basic chat application using the open source Swim platform. The app we’ll be referencing was built by Scott Clarke, a UI developer at Swim, and the source code is available on GitHub here. Because this chat application is intended to demonstrate Swim development patterns, as opposed to being a usable product, we have not included features like authentication or compressive user state tracking. While we do include user presence in the chat app, we took the simplest approach possible and just display a user’s local IP address. This app may be simple, but the same patterns we demonstrate here can be used to build a massively scalable version, and can easily be integrated with authentication services or other third-party software.