Great news for the Flutter community: CachedNetworkImage joins the existing set of Baseflow packages
Great news for the Flutter community: CachedNetworkImage joins the existing set of Baseflow packages. Why is this excellent news for the community? CachedNetworkImage is one of the most popular packages (it is in the top 10 of Top Flutter Packages). Within Baseflow, we will be able to give better support to the package and add new functionality.
CachedNetworkImage was developed in December 2017 because I needed the functionality for a hobby app, and I needed a basic caching mechanism. As Flutter was still in its early development stages young at that time, there wasn't any image caching mechanisms available other than in memory. I made the library available on open source and published it on pub.dev. Flutter started to mature and grow in popularity, and so did my package. I never anticipated CachedNetworkImage to become so widely used, so to support a bit more than basic caching, I decided to rewrite the whole package at the end of 2018, the start of 2019, just before the number of issues on GitHub would get over my head.
In my professional work, I rarely had the opportunity to work with Flutter; I was always working on hobby projects. This year Baseflow allowed me to work on exciting Flutter apps and spend some time on open source projects. You might already know some of the existing Baseflow packages, such as geolocator and permission_handler. Next to the Flutter packages we also have some very well known Xamarin packages as MvvmCross and the Xamarin Media Manager. So I'm proud that CachedNetworkImage joined a rich suite of open source projects, and I can collaborate with some of the brightest minds.
The backlog of plans for CachedNetworkImage is vast, so the priority is to get the issues, and PRs cleaned up. Next, we will focus on testing and code quality. Only after that, we will focus on new features, such as support beyond Android and iOS.
