Aporia

The Aporia Network: a framework for building fast, educational apps.

Current apps made with Aporia include:

• 2cousins
• CGS Maths Club
• NOVA

Cloning

To get started with Aporia, begin with the following setup:

1. Fork the repository
2. Install the Flutter rename package
   • flutter pub global activate rename
3. Rename the app name and id globally
   • flutter pub global run rename --bundleId com.example.app
   • flutter pub global run rename --appname "Example App"
4. Replace all instances of aporia_app and Aporia Network Display Name with your Flutter app name with your chosen IDE and run flutter pub get
5. Replace the config values in lib/utils/config.dart
6. Replace the app assets in assets
7. Replace the adaptive_background_color, color and description in pubspec.yaml
8. Run flutter pub get and then dart run icons_launcher:create and dart run flutter_native_splash:create
9. Run flutter clean and then flutter pub get
10. Run flutterfire configure
11. Update the directory in the gh-pages.yml workflow

All done!

Documentation

Frontend: Flutter

The application has been created using Flutter, a framework by Google to create cross-platform applications. Programmed in Dart, the framework allows for the singular codebase above to compile to most popular platforms.

The entrypoint of the codebase is the main.dart file, with the first function called being the main() function. Flutter is a widget based framework, meaning that almost everything is a "widget", the UI being comprised widgets inside more widgets. As such, the main.dart file creates a custom implementation of a widget, which is presented as our app. To read more about how Flutter works, read the documentation here.

Backend: Firebase

The backend for the app, as with many others, is Firebase, an SDK by Google that allows for an easy backend implementation for mobile applications. Firebase helps us handle our user authentication, our user's data, and much, much more. You can read more about Firebase and what it does here

Modules:

For convenience’s sake, the documentation of the app will be split up into multiple smaller modules, explaining individual functionality of certain features. Skip to any section as you like to read more about how it works.

Theming

The Aporia Network follows the Material UI design standard, utilising a combination of Flutter's built in theming tools, and the Adaptive Theme package to handle light and dark mode changes.

Theme Data

To start with, the theme.dart defines our global themes. It's a relatively short file, using Flutter's built in ThemeData class to define both a light and dark mode colour palette, which can be used throughout the app dynamically. You can read more about the ThemeData class here

Adaptive Theme

The second element of the app's theming is the Adaptive Theme package, which allows for dynamically setting the theme based on light and dark mode, extending upon the functionality already built into Flutter. Namely, the package takes the themes from the theme.dart file above and feeds them into the light and dark input values of AdaptiveTheme, allowing for control over if the theme is light, dark, or system at any given moment.

Login System

The login system is powered by Firebase and the FlutterFire UI package, which provides pre-built widgets and utilities which help integrate the login system with minimal setup.

Landing Page

After Firebase is initialised from the main.dart file, we are taken to the AuthGate class, residing in the landing_page.dart file. This essentially acts as a router and a gate to direct traffic based on the current user's status. The class listens to FirebaseAuth, and if the user is logged in, will send them to the home page, and if not, will send them to the login page.

Login Page

As the name suggests, this page is made for log-ins of users, but also for creating new accounts and resetting passwords. The LoginPage function just returns an instance of SignInScreen, a class available from FlutterFire UI that almost does everything for us. The documentation is quite helpful, and the app just uses the screen from this guide for the login page. This website is quite nice to visualise what all the different widgets do and how they can be customised. Currently, the app just uses Google and Apple as sign-in providers, and our logo at the top to make the login page look a slight bit more customised.