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

Asynchronous programming

Dart is a single-threaded programming language, meaning that all of the application code runs in the same thread. Put simply, this means that any code may block thread execution by performing long-running operations such as input/output (I/O) or HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests. This can obviously be an issue if your app is stuck waiting for something slow such as an HTTP request while the user is trying to interact with it. The app would effectively freeze and not respond to the user's input.

However, although Dart is single-threaded, it can perform asynchronous operations through the use of Futures. This allows your code to trigger an operation, continue doing other work, and then come back when the operation has been completed. To represent the result of these asynchronous operations, Dart uses the Future object combined with the async and await keywords. Let's look at these concepts now so that we can learn how to write a responsive...