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

How do plugins work on iOS and Android?

Many plugins will work with the different underlying platforms to use OS functionality. This dependency changes the way your project is built and run because there is native code within your project that interfaces with the underlying platform. Let’s look at how that interfacing works.

MethodChannel

Flutter communication between the client (Flutter) and the host (native) application occurs through platform channels. The MethodChannel class is responsible for sending messages (method invocations) to the platform side. On the platform side, MethodChannel on Android (API) and FlutterMethodChannel on iOS (API) allow you to receive method calls and send a result back. The structure of this relationship is shown in the following diagram:

Figure 9.5 – Interface between Flutter and native

Figure 9.5 – Interface between Flutter and native

The platform channel technique allows you to decouple the UI code from the platform-specific native code. The host...