This week, my main task was to implement barcode scanning capabilities in the app. Initially, before doing any work on the app this was a daunting task. As I did my research, I was able to find multiple Flutter packages that simplified this functionality quite a bit. I selected one of the most popular packages that showed up as a search result when looking for “barcode scanning” on pub.dev.
The documentation provided for the package was quite sparse, but luckily there was also a Github repo linked that provided an example implementation. When it came to implementing the barcode scanner package, it was quite simple and self-explanatory when paired with the example.
Overall, the package implementation difficulty I would rank it a 2/5. It was straight-forward and required very little knowledge about the package itself to get up and running. The next step for this functionality is to test it.
On the emulator, I was not aware that I can use the camera through a webcam. My partner, Mihai, informed that this was possible. So my next task is to test the effectiveness of the barcode scanner and to see the output.
My goal for the next week is to implement the Barcode Lookup API to allow for searching of products through a typed search or barcode scanning.