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

Passing data between screens

In almost all apps, there is the concept of application state. This is larger than the state within one widget as it travels with the user throughout the app. If you have worked with other frameworks, you will have seen varying ways to hold application state, and Flutter doesn't have a single way to hold and share state.

We will look at options for how to store application state long term in Chapter 9, Popular Third-Party Plugins, but once the state has been retrieved from storage, how should you share that state among your many different application screens?

It's worth noting that there is no right or wrong answer for state management, but every approach has benefits and weaknesses and you will need to decide which approach suits you from a maintenance, code readability, and app usage perspective.

Passing state in widget parameters

The simplest way to share state around your app, and probably the way most developers start managing...