Sylvia is a Google Developer Expert for Flutter/Dart. Her preferred professional role includes some IT management but also enough hands-on development work to keep her dev skills sharp. Her main interest lies in exploring new technologies in the space of mobile apps and web technologies. She is currently playing with Flutter, Firebase, and some ML for Android but might change focus as new technologies pop up.
Sylvia divides her time between South Africa and Germany. She is a Women Techmaker (WTM) Ambassador and an active member of the GDG Cape Town chapter. She is a frequent speaker at GDG events and aims to support the developer community through mentoring and events.
Sylvia Dieckmann
Mobile App Developer, GDE Flutter/Dart
Bringing Google Maps to Flutter: The Power of Plugins
Flutter allows developing high-quality apps for multiple platforms (Android, iOS, Web, and more) from a single code base. But some app functionality depends on platform-specific APIs, a requirement seemingly at odds with “one codebase for all platforms”. To bridge this gap, Flutter defines the concept of Plugins to access native apis from cross-platform code.
In this talk I will build a simple Flutter app that displays a map, looks up an address (geo-coding), and plots a route (directions) with the help of two existing Flutter plugins. Both are cross-platform but under the hood make use of platform specific APIs, combining multiple platform specific solutions into a single developer friendly package.
After showing how to use the Google Maps and geocoding packages in my app, I will dissect the basic structure of the two plugins and discuss how a developer might extend them, for example by adding support for a new platform.