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

Exploring Firebase plugins

In this section, we will look at one of the most common sets of plugins that are used by Flutter app developers and explain how they can be used within your apps. Firebase is a Google product that provides multiple technologies for multiple platforms. If you are a mobile or web developer, you may be familiar with this amazing platform.

Among its offered technologies, the important ones are listed here:

  • Realtime Database: A NoSQL (non-relational) database on the cloud. With this, you can store and access data in real time.
  • Cloud Firestore: A NoSQL database, with a focus on big and scalable applications, that provides more advanced query support compared to a real-time database.
  • Cloud Functions: These are coded functions that are triggered by an activity that may come from another Firebase product, including the previous ones, or the user (using the software development kit (SDK)). We can develop scripts to react to changes in a database...