Show HN: Celest – Flutter Cloud Platform (celest.dev)

1. Celest is fully managed and does not require any knowledge of the cloud. With Serverpod, you must have a cloud account and manage your own infrastructure.

2. In Celest, all of your backend and infrastructure logic is defined solely in Dart. This differs from Serverpod which incorporates technologies like Docker, Terraform, and YAML to define your backend.

There are similarities too. Celest will auto-generate a client library for you like Serverpod and provides a local development environment. Uniquely, though, Celest supports hot reload for your backend ;-)

Celest's biggest strength with cloud functions is its integration with the Dart language. The CLI generates a strongly-typed API client for you which matches the declaration of your function, and handles all serialization out-of-the-box.

So, if you write a top-level Dart function like this

    // In `celest/functions/my_api.dart`
    Future<String> sayHello(String name) async => 'Hello, name!';

    celest.functions.myApi.sayHello(name: 'Celest'); // Hello, Celest

Currently we just have the CLI to manage your account, although I'm working on a web-based dashboard for better accessibility.

The result of a deployment is just a URL, which is automatically placed in your generated client (see `celest/lib/client.dart`). To switch to this new environment, pass the production arg to your `celest.init` call like this:

    void main() {
      celest.init(environment: CelestEnvironment.production);
      runApp(MyApp());
    }

My immediate plan for reducing lock-in is to provide the option to deploy into a cloud account you manage. This has the upside of making your deployed infrastructure independent of Celest and letting you use your cloud credits.

Self-hosting is another option I'm considering, but I don't have a good sense yet of what that could look like. Any thoughts? Is spitting out a binary/Dockerfile sufficient to alleviate risk?

If I get shut down, I'll be open-sourcing all my code. And regardless, I plan to open source more and more of the platform over time.

Though, Flutter Web has come a long ways recently, especially with the WASM work that's underway [1][2]. Flutter is very well positioned, I think, for web applications requiring a lot of interactivity and complex layouts--the DX is phenomenal. For static sites, it's very hard to beat a pure HTML/CSS/JS stack in terms of speed and optimization potential.

That being said, I think there's a good chance we'll see more work on Dart web frameworks going forward. Projects like Zap[3] and Jaspr[4] and doing great work in this area already. And it's safe to say we may see a Celest Web framework one day!

[1] https://flutter.dev/wasm

[2] https://flutterweb-wasm.web.app

[3] https://pub.dev/packages/zap

[4] https://pub.dev/packages/jaspr

Having seen the development of Flutter and its ecosystem over the past 7 years, I've come to really believe in the framework and its mission. There have been lots of companies which have found success building with Flutter [1] and it very often speaks to their bottom lines [2].

I'm hopeful for its continued success, but more importantly, I believe that having more companies building enterprise solutions makes the technology more attractive and practical to adopt. The founder of Flutter has started Shorebird [3] and the FlutterFlow team recently closed a $25M Series A [4]. These are great investments to have into Flutter.

Another cool stat: Dart was the fastest growing programming language among all languages last year at 33%! [5]

All that to say, I believe the business value of Flutter is becoming clear and I think having more companies building on top will reduce adoption risk and create a very rich ecosystem for further progress.

[1] https://flutter.dev/showcase

[2] https://assets-global.website-files.com/5ee12d8e99cde2e20255...

[3] https://shorebird.dev/

[4] https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/11/flutterflow-attracts-cash-...

[5] https://www.developernation.net/resources/reports/state-of-t...

Google is not killing Flutter. Despite Google's rep, Flutter is a highly successful project that Google uses for many of its own products, including Google Pay, Google Classroom, and Google Ads. It's also used by other major companies: https://flutter.dev/showcase.

Although it's not listed on my landing, it is absolutely a goal of Celest to be a funnel for these use cases and partner with the community as we go to fill the gaps.