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

Stateful/stateless widgets

In Chapter 1, An Introduction to Flutter, we learned that widgets play an important role in Flutter application development. They are the pieces that form the UI; they are the code representation of what is visible to the user.

UIs are almost never static; they change frequently, as you will have experienced when you have used a web page or an application. Although immutable by definition, widgets are not meant to be final – after all, we are dealing with a UI, and a UI will certainly change during the life cycle of any application. That's why Flutter provides two types of widgets: stateless and stateful.

Immutability

Most programming languages refer to the term "immutable." An immutable object is an object that never changes. That is, it cannot change itself, and it cannot be changed externally. Instead, if a change is needed, then the object is simply replaced. A stateless widget is immutable because it cannot change its properties...