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

Cross-platform frameworks

Let's look at a few alternative frameworks. There are quite a few options, but many are based around three core approaches: React Native, Cordova, and Xamarin.

React Native

The most common cross-platform framework before Flutter was released was React Native. Like Flutter, React Native is open source, and like Flutter, it is backed by a big software development company in the form of Facebook:

Figure 3.2 – React Native logo

It is a popular framework mainly because it reuses the technologies and methodologies of the React web framework. There is a very healthy React Native community that takes the framework forward and produces plugins for the different platforms. Also, given the greater maturity of the framework, there is likely to be a greater wealth of plugin support and documentation available.

Technology wise, React Native uses JavaScript for the general app look and feel, and then Java or Swift to write native...