Book Image

Flutter Cookbook

By : Simone Alessandria, Brian Kayfitz
4 (1)
Book Image

Flutter Cookbook

4 (1)
By: Simone Alessandria, Brian Kayfitz

Overview of this book

“Anyone interested in developing Flutter applications for Android or iOS should have a copy of this book on their desk.” – Amazon 5* Review Lauded as the ‘Flutter bible’ for new and experienced mobile app developers, this recipe-based guide will teach you the best practices for robust app development, as well as how to solve cross-platform development issues. From setting up and customizing your development environment to error handling and debugging, The Flutter Cookbook covers the how-tos as well as the principles behind them. As you progress, the recipes in this book will get you up to speed with the main tasks involved in app development, such as user interface and user experience (UI/UX) design, API design, and creating animations. Later chapters will focus on routing, retrieving data from web services, and persisting data locally. A dedicated section also covers Firebase and its machine learning capabilities. The last chapter is specifically designed to help you create apps for the web and desktop (Windows, Mac, and Linux). Throughout the book, you’ll also find recipes that cover the most important features needed to build a cross-platform application, along with insights into running a single codebase on different platforms. By the end of this Flutter book, you’ll be writing and delivering fully functional apps with confidence.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
16
About Packt

Using a Future

When you write your code, you generally expect your instructions to run sequentially, one line after the other. For instance, let's say you write the following:

int x = 5;
int y = x * 2;

You expect the value of y to be equal to 10 because the instruction int x = 5 completes before the next line. In other words, the second line waits for the first instruction to complete before being executed.

In most cases, this pattern works perfectly, but in some cases, and specifically, when you need to run instructions that take longer to complete, this is not the recommended approach, as your app would be unresponsive until the task is completed. That's why in almost all modern programming languages, including Dart, you can perform asynchronous operations.

Asynchronous operations do not stop the main line of execution, and therefore they allow the execution of other tasks before completing.

Consider the following diagram:

In the diagram, you can see how the main execution...