A demonstration of using isolate_agents to offload work from the ui thread in Flutter.
Generate the platform files by running flutter create . then execute the
example with flutter run. All platforms are supported except web since it
lacks isolates.
The steps that the app takes are the following:
- Load the text asset with all the decrypted messages, split them up, encrypt them and write them to the documents directory.
- Query the platforms documents directory and store it on the agent.
- Start a timer that will trigger a job that will read the encrypted message from the documents directory and decrypt it every second.
- When the job is finished, if we have a new decrypted message add it to the cache on the root isolate and reload the scroll view.
How does this code differ from using Isolate directly?
- There is much less code and a consistent interface to working with Isolates.
How does this code differ from using Flutter's compute function?
- The Isolate lives long enough to be reused whenever we receive the request to decrypt a new message.
- The Isolate can store state, in this case the documents directory, so it doesn't have to recalculate it on the Isolate or send it over every time.