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

Exploring Firebase plugins

In this section, we will look at one of the most common sets of plugins that are used by Flutter app developers and explain how they can be used within your apps. Firebase is a Google product that provides multiple technologies for multiple platforms. If you are a mobile or web developer, you may be familiar with this amazing platform.

Among its offered technologies, the important ones are listed here:

  • Realtime Database: A NoSQL (non-relational) database on the cloud. With this, you can store and access data in real time.
  • Cloud Firestore: A NoSQL database, with a focus on big and scalable applications that provide advanced query support compared to a real-time database.
  • Cloud Functions: Functions triggered by many Firebase products, such as the previous ones, and also by the user (using the software development kit (SDK)). We can develop scripts to react to changes in a database, user authentication, and more.
  • Performance Monitoring...