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

Widget testing

Getting the right mix of tests is important so that you can test your app optimally without reducing iteration and development velocity. Writing unit tests for well-defined library functions makes sense, but when it comes to user interactions, you often want to iterate and understand user interactions before settling on a design, which then may change as fashion or best practices change. Therefore, your test itself should be more high-level, looking at components rather than specific functions. One example of this is widget tests, and Flutter helps us write widget tests to test that widgets work as expected.

Widget tests are used to validate widgets in an isolated way. They look very similar to unit tests but focus on widgets. The main goal is to check widget interactions and whether widgets visually match expectations. As widgets live in the widget tree inside the Flutter context, widget tests require the framework environment to be executed. That is why Flutter...