Book Image

Cross-Platform UIs with Flutter

By : Ryan Edge, Alberto Miola
Book Image

Cross-Platform UIs with Flutter

By: Ryan Edge, Alberto Miola

Overview of this book

Flutter is a UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, desktop, and embedded devices from a single code base. With Flutter, you can write your code once and run it anywhere using a single code base to target multiple platforms. This book is a comprehensive, project-based guide for new and emerging Flutter developers that will help empower you to build bulletproof applications. Once you start reading book, you’ll quickly realize what sets Flutter apart from its competition and establish some of the fundamentals of the toolkit. As you work on various project applications, you’ll understand just how easy Flutter is to use for building stunning UIs. This book covers navigation strategies, state management, advanced animation handling, and the two main UI design styles: Material and Cupertino. It’ll help you extend your knowledge with good code practices, UI testing strategies, and CI setup to constantly keep your repository’s quality at the highest level possible. By the end of this book, you'll feel confident in your ability to transfer the lessons from the example projects and build your own Flutter applications for any platform you wish.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Declarative routing with Navigator 2.0

Now that we have learned how to build our Hacker News application using Flutter’s legacy navigation APIs, we can refactor our Hacker News Application to use Flutter’s declarative Navigator 2.0 APIs. Specifically, we will look at how to use a newer library provided and maintained by the Flutter team called go_router. Navigator 2.0 was introduced to provide a more powerful, declarative API that would empower developers who suffered from some of the shortcomings of Navigator 1.0, specifically the following:

  • The inability to have more fine-grained control over the navigation stack.
  • The inability to properly handle web URLs and deep linking.
  • The inability to have state changes easily triggers navigation.

The Navigator 2.0 spec, while more powerful is a more low-level API that is missing many of Navigator 1.0’s capabilities, such as pushReplacement or pushNamed. Fortunately, Google actively maintains a library...