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

Debugging your app

Debugging is an important part of software development. Small mistakes, strange behaviors, and complex bugs can be solved with the help of debugging. With this, we can do the following:

  • Make logic assertions
  • Determine required improvements
  • Find memory leaks
  • Perform flow analysis

Flutter provides multiple tools to help you debug your app. Specifically, Flutter IDEscan assists with debugging. However, the Dart tooling also allows debugging without the IDE, which we will see in the following sections.

Observatory

Flutter debugging is based on the Dart Observatory tool. Dart Observatory is present in the Dart SDK and helps with profiling and debugging Dart applications such as Flutter apps.

You can explore the Observatory by running Dart specific code using the dart run --observe command where you will receive an address:port part of the output. This address is the Observatory UI address; you can access it through standard web browsers...