We have a request from a client concerning the development of an app for Windows Surface.
I don’t know the status of Flutter for this and there are 2 lines in particular that I’m looking for information / feedback on: Database (the app must work offline) and use of the Surface cameras (scanning and interpreting barcodes).
Have any of you already been able to experiment or deploy this kind of application?
Any database recommendations?
If you don’t want to deal with SQL (but you REALLY should, as it is the right tool for the job), you can always use Drift ORM (and the author of Drift, Simon, is a very nice and open guy).
You can add PowerSync on top of that and have a nice offline-first database synced with Postgres (I use Hasura, others use Supabase, but any PG installation works).
The good about that last part is that both Hasura/Supabase and PowerSync are SaaS, so you can start with 0 effort and then, if you grow too much, install both on docker on-premises.
Run like hell from solutions like Hive and Isar (both abandoned by the author, full of bugs (that corrupts databases)), bad design (Isar 3 only supports int PKs, which are useless in a distributed environment). SQLite is in use in trillions of instances (and I’m not exaggerating), so it is well battle-tested.