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

Asynchronous programming

Dart is a single-threaded programming language, meaning that all of the application code runs in the same thread. Put simply, this means that any code may block thread execution by performing long-running operations such as input/output (I/O) or HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests. This can be an issue if your app is stuck waiting for something slow such as an HTTP request while the user is trying to interact with it. The app would effectively freeze and not respond to the user’s input.

However, although Dart is single-threaded, it can perform asynchronous operations through the use of Futures. This allows your code to trigger an operation, continue doing other work, and then come back when the operation has been completed. To represent the result of these asynchronous operations, Dart uses the Future object combined with the async and await keywords. Let’s look at these concepts now so that we can learn how to write a responsive application...