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

Using AnimatedBuilder

Looking at the code that we wrote in the last section, there is nothing wrong with it— it's neither too complex nor too big. However, looking closely, we can see a small problem with it—our button animation is mixed up with other widgets. As long as our code does not scale and get more complex, this is fine, but we know this is not the case most of the time, so we might have a real problem.

The AnimatedBuilder class can help us with the task of separating responsibilities. Our widget, whether it is ElevatedButton or anything else, does not need to know it is rendered in animation, and breaking down the build method to widgets that each have a single responsibility can be seen as one of the fundamental concepts in the Flutter framework. Let's look at the AnimatedBuilder class and then revisit our animation with our new knowledge.

The AnimatedBuilder class

The AnimatedBuilder widget exists so that we can build complex widgets that...