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

A deeper look at the stateful widget life cycle

In the previous chapter, we looked at how stateful widgets differ from stateless widgets and how the build() method can be called multiple times, triggered by the setState() method.

However, there are some additional parts of the life cycle of a stateful widget that we will explore at this point because they are important to how we manage input data and also become increasingly important throughout the rest of the book as we look at more advanced widget interactions.

Key life cycle states

There are several life cycle states that a stateful widget can pass through. In this section, we will look at the states that you will need in most situations. Later in the book, we will introduce additional life cycle states for specific scenarios and corner cases.

Creation of the state

The creation of a state happens at the very start of the stateful widget life cycle, just after the constructor is called. The stateful widget creates...