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

Cross-platform frameworks

Let’s look at a few alternative frameworks. There are quite a few options, but many are based on three core approaches: React Native, Cordova, and Xamarin.

React Native

The most common cross-platform framework before Flutter was released was React Native. Like Flutter, React Native is open source, and like Flutter, it is backed by a big software development company in the form of Facebook:

Figure 3.2 – React Native logo

Figure 3.2 – React Native logo

It is a popular framework mainly because it reuses the technologies and methodologies of the React web framework. There is a very healthy React Native community that takes the framework forward and produces plugins for different platforms. Also, given the greater maturity of the framework, there is likely to be a greater wealth of plugin support and documentation available.

Technology-wise, React Native uses JavaScript for the app’s general look and feel, and then Java or Swift to...