Tech Stack
This documentation outlines the technical stack used to build and power Flex mobile apps. It aims to provide an understanding of the technologies, tools, and best practices that power your app to ensure a consistent, maintainable, and accelerated experience for both developers and customers.
Technologies
The goal of Flex is to help commerce professionals build mobile applications easily in order to unlock retail, B2B and B2C use cases.
In order to accomplish this goal of significantly reducing development time as well as the long-term total cost of ownership, the underlying technology had to meet the following three criteria:
1. Amazing Customer Experience
Smooth and consistent experience across platforms. Fast, performant, and native to the customer’s device - not a web experience jammed into an app.
2. Maintainable Codebase
Single, clean codebase that decreases technical debt and total cost of ownership. Large developer community and package ecosystem to ensure scalability and growth alongside the business.
3. Accelerated Development
Ability to build, test and deploy rapidly - while adapting and connecting to any headless backend. Full visibility and analytics to allow business teams to experiment and measure.
Why Flutter?
It is for the reasons above that we chose to use Dart and Flutter to build the Flex ecosystem of tools.
Flutter is a UI toolkit created by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, desktop, and embedded devices from a single codebase.
Technologies Used
The following list contains the primary dependencies of Flex Storefront and Flex UI.
| Technology | Description | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Dart | Client-optimized language for developing fast apps on any platform | core |
| Flutter | An open-source UI software development kit created by Google | core |
| auto_route | Navigation package allowing for deeplinks, guarded routes, and more. | navigation |
| flutter_bloc | A predictable state management library for Dart. | state |
Why these technologies?
At Flex, we’ve got loads of experience crafting large-scale eCommerce apps. We’ve tried and use a number of different of technologies and frameworks, and we believe the ones we’ve listed are top-notch for whipping up eCommerce apps that can handle the heat of Black Friday as well as remain easy to maintain in the long term.
That said, we remain open to learning about new tools that will better help accomplish our goals for commerce app development, and may change our recommendations given the right circumstances.