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

Flutter strengths and weaknesses

So, we’ve had a look at the other options available to you for your mobile project and looked at the vitality of the Flutter community. This book is not designed to brainwash you into thinking Flutter is the best option (though it probably is), but given the context of the technology landscape, let’s recap the strengths and weaknesses of Flutter so that you can make an informed decision.

Strengths

The following are some of the strengths of Flutter:

  • Hot reload: Flutter has the best hot reload functionality (equal to React Native and Xamarin), and this is a huge productivity benefit.
  • Single code base: Of all the options available, only a couple (Flutter and Cordova) truly have a single code base that will work across platforms. As discussed, this helps hugely with project management, defect resolution, and new platforms becoming relevant or old platforms being retired.
  • Project vitality: Flutter has a very active community...