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

Releasing your app on the web

Compared to the configuration headaches of Android and iOS, the web release process can be much simpler. You only need to run the following command:

flutter build web

This will generate the app and all required assets and place them into the following folder:

/build/web

The trickiest part is to decide how to host your web app. As mentioned previously, Firebase hosting is a great choice for this. Not only is the setup very easy but it’s also cheap until you start to really scale up.

Firebase hosting

To set up Firebase hosting, set up a Firebase account (as discussed in Chapter 9, Flutter Plugins – Get Great Functionality for Free!). Then, on your local machine, install the Firebase CLI (explained at the following link):

https://firebase.google.com/docs/cli

This will give you the ability to run firebase commands from your command line.

Next, run the Firebase initialization command on your project:

firebase init
...