Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Second Edition

By : Thomas Bailey, Alessandro Biessek
Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Second Edition

By: Thomas Bailey, Alessandro Biessek

Overview of this book

There have been many attempts at creating frameworks that are truly cross-platform, but most struggle to create a native-like experience at high performance levels. Flutter achieves this with an elegant design and a wealth of third-party plugins, making it the future of mobile app development. If you are a mobile developer who wants to create rich and expressive native apps with the latest Google Flutter framework, this book is for you. This book will guide you through developing your first app from scratch all the way to production release. Starting with the setup of your development environment, you'll learn about your app's UI design and responding to user input via Flutter widgets, manage app navigation and screen transitions, and create widget animations. You'll then explore the rich set of third party-plugins, including Firebase and Google Maps, and get to grips with testing and debugging. Finally, you'll get up to speed with releasing your app to mobile stores and the web. By the end of this Flutter book, you'll have gained the confidence to create, edit, test, and release a full Flutter app on your own.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Flutter and Dart
6
Section 2: The Flutter User Interface – Everything Is a Widget
10
Section 3: Developing Fully Featured Apps
14
Section 4: Testing and App Release

What is a plugin?

Many programming frameworks and software tools have the concept of plugins. They may go by another name, such as third-party libraries, extensions, or add-ons, but they are effectively the same thing – a self-contained, modular code deliverable that can be "plugged in" to your existing app code to provide extra functionality.

Within this chapter, you will see references to the term packages, a chunk of Dart code, and assets. A plugin is a special type of package that makes functionality available to your app and this is what we are looking at in this chapter.

There are many benefits as well as drawbacks to the plugin approach. So let's take a look and understand why Flutter would choose to use plugins within the framework and then we will move on to the drawbacks.

Benefits

As you would expect, Flutter uses plugins because they bring many benefits. This is especially true of code reuse; creating a great Flutter app would be much harder...