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

How do plugins work on iOS and Android?

Many plugins will work with the different underlying platforms to use operating system functionality. This dependency changes the way your project is built and run because there is native code within your project that interfaces with the underlying platform. Let's look at how that interfacing works.

MethodChannel

Flutter communication between the client (Flutter) and the host (native) application occurs through platform channels. The MethodChannel class is responsible for sending messages (method invocations) to the platform side. On the platform side, MethodChannel on Android (API) and FlutterMethodChannel on iOS (API) enable receiving method calls and sending a result back. The structure of this relationship is shown in the following diagram.

Figure 8.5 – Interface between Flutter and native

The platform channel technique allows for the decoupling of the UI code from the platform-specific native code...