Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Third Edition

By : Thomas Bailey, Alessandro Biessek
5 (2)
Book Image

Flutter for Beginners - Third Edition

5 (2)
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, solidifying its status as 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. You’ll start with the basics of cross-platform development frameworks, specifically Flutter. You’ll then explore the Dart programming language which is the foundation of the Flutter framework. Next, you’ll get a feel for Flutter and how to create your first app, followed by an exploration of the various popular plugins that supplement the Flutter framework. Finally, you’ll explore testing and app release, including some common glitches that you may experience. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to create and release a basic Flutter app along with gaining a solid understanding of the Flutter framework and Dart language.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1:Learning the Core Concepts
6
Part 2:Building a Basic Flutter App
11
Part 3:Turning a Simple App into an Awesome App
15
Part 4:Testing and Releasing Your App

Understanding the Navigator widget

Mobile applications will almost always contain more than one screen. If you are an Android or iOS developer, you probably know about the Activity or ViewController classes, which represent screens on those platforms.

An important class for navigation between screens in Flutter is the Navigator widget, which is responsible for managing screen changes while maintaining a history of screens so that the user can move back through the screens (if the app chooses to allow it).

A new screen in Flutter is just a new widget that is effectively placed on top of the existing widgets. This is managed through the concept of routes, which define the possible navigable routes a user can follow through the app. Unsurprisingly, there is a class named Route that is a helper for working on the navigation workflow.

The main classes in the navigation layer are as follows:

  • Navigator: The route manager
  • Overlay: Navigator uses this to specify the appearances...