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

Widget testing

Getting the right mix of tests is important so that you can test your app optimally without reducing iteration and development velocity. Writing unit tests for well-defined library functions makes sense, but when it comes to user interactions, you often want to iterate and understand user interactions before settling on a design, which then may change as fashion or best practices change. Therefore, your test itself should be more high-level, looking at components rather than specific functions. One example of this is widget tests, and Flutter helps us to write widget tests to test that widgets work as expected.

Widget tests are used to validate widgets in an isolated way. They look very similar to unit tests but focus on widgets. The main goal is to check widget interactions and whether widgets visually match expectations. As widgets live in the widget tree inside the Flutter context, widget tests require the framework environment to be executed. That is why Flutter...