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

Native development

Often cited as the purest solution, native development refers to writing apps in the language common to the platform of the device. For iOS, this is Swift (or previously, Objective-C); for Android, it is Kotlin (or previously, Java); and for the web, it is generally HTML/JavaScript:

Figure 3.1 – Swift and Kotlin logos

Figure 3.1 – Swift and Kotlin logos

Native is seen as the purest solution because there is no bridge between the app and the platform – that is, there is no transpilation of code. Therefore, the code that is developed is the code that is run and talks directly to the features available from the platform, be that iOS, Android, or a web browser.

What is transpilation?

Transpilation of code is the idea of taking code written in one programming language and converting it into code written in another programming language. An example that you may have come across is TypeScript, which transpiles into JavaScript. This is done because web browsers...