77 lines
4.2 KiB
Plaintext
77 lines
4.2 KiB
Plaintext
---
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slug: /
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id: introduction
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sidebar_position: 1
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title: Overview
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---
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About The Flutter SDK
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Stream Chat is a service that helps you easily build a full chat experience in your Flutter apps.
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We also support a variety of other SDKs.
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This section of the documentation focuses on our Flutter SDK which helps you easily
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ship high quality messaging experiences in apps and programs built with the [Flutter toolkit
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made by Google](https://flutter.dev).
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The Stream Chat Flutter SDK comprises five different packages to choose from, ranging from ones
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giving you complete control to ones that give you a rich out-of-the-box chat experience.
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The packages that make up the Stream Chat SDK are:
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1. <b>Low Level Client (`stream_chat`)</b>: a pure Dart package that can be used on any Dart project.
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It provides a low-level client to access the Stream Chat service.
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2. <b>Core (`stream_chat_flutter_core`)</b>: provides business logic to fetch common things required
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for integrating Stream Chat into your application.
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The core package allows more customisation and hence provides business logic but no UI components.
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3. <b>UI (`stream_chat_flutter`)</b>: this library includes both a low-level chat SDK and a set of
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reusable and customizable UI components.
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4. <b>Persistence (`stream_chat_persistence`)</b>: provides a persistence client for fetching and
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saving chat data locally.
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5. <b>Localizations (`stream_chat_localizations`)</b>: provides a set of localizations for the SDK.
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We recommend building prototypes using the full UI package, [`stream_chat_flutter`](https://pub.dev/packages/stream_chat_flutter),
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since it contains UI widgets already integrated with Stream's API. It is the fastest way to get up
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and running using Stream chat in your app.
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The Flutter SDK enables you to build any type of chat or messaging experience for Android, iOS, Web
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and Desktop.
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If you're building a very custom UI and would prefer a more lean package,
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[`stream_chat_flutter_core`](https://pub.dev/packages/stream_chat_flutter_core) will be suited to this
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use case. Core allows you to build custom, expressive UIs while retaining the benefits of our full
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Flutter SDK. APIs for accessing and controlling users, sending messages, and so forth are seamlessly integrated
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into this package and accessible via providers and builders.
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Before going into the docs, let's take a small detour to look at how the elements of Stream Chat are structured.
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### Basic Structure
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There are two core elements in chat, <b>Users</b> and <b>Channels</b>.
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Channels are groups of one or more users that can message each other.
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In an app, you need to have a user connected to query channels.
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There is no specific distinction between a chat with only two people and a group chat,
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but there is a way to create a unique chat between a certain number of people by creating a <b>distinct</b> channel.
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In essence, a normal two-person chat would be a <b>distinct channel</b> created with two members (you cannot add or delete members in this channel), whereas a group created with two people would simply be a <b>non distinct channel</b> (possible to add or remove members).
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:::note
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It is also possible to add more than two people in a distinct channel which retains the same add/removal properties and resembles the Slack DMs where you can DM one or more people as well.
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:::
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In summary, if you were creating a Whatsapp-like app, the first screen would be a <b>list of channels</b> - which on opening would show a <b>list of messages</b> that were sent by the users in the Channel.
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While this is a simplistic overview of the service, the Flutter SDK handles the UI and more time consuming things (media upload, offline storage, theming, etc.) for you.
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Before reading the docs, consider trying our [online API tour](https://getstream.io/chat/get_started/),
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it is a nice way to learn how the API works.
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It's in-browser so you'll need to use JavaScript but the core concepts are pretty much the same as Dart.
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You may also like to look at the [Flutter tutorial](https://getstream.io/chat/flutter/tutorial/)
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which focuses on using the UI package to get Stream Chat integrated into a Flutter app.
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Further sections break down each individual packages and explain several common operations. |