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

Chapter 11: Testing and Debugging

Flutter provides great tools to help the developer manage their app development and ensure that it is ready for production – from a test API to IDE tools and plugins. This is especially crucial in app development where, unlike in some scenarios such as web pages, a bug fix can take several days to be reviewed by the relevant store, and then be updated on user devices.

In this chapter, you will learn how to add tests to identify bugs within your app, use debugging tools to identify where an issue is within your code, profile your app performance to find bottlenecks, and inspect the UI widgets.

We will start the chapter with an exploration of how you can unit test your Dart code. This can be useful if you create a reusable library of functions that you are using across many apps and want to ensure that any changes to the library code continue to function as intended.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Unit testing...