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

DevTools

DevTools is defined as follows in the documentation:

“DevTools is a suite of performance and debugging tools for Dart and Flutter.”

DevTools can be accessed via the web browser; you may have seen the DevTools URL printed to the console when you did a flutter run command. However, most people will use DevTools from within their IDE, so let’s explore that option further, specifically two areas that you will use often – widget and performance inspection.

If you still have the Hello World app running, then you will see a magnifying glass on the debug controls. Click this button to open up the wonderful world of DevTools.

The widget inspector

We are currently in debug mode, so the widget inspector will be opened for us, allowing us to inspect the layout of our app. The widget inspector allows us to check whether our widget tree is taking more space than needed, whether it has more widgets than needed, or whether a widget is being created...