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

A deeper look at the stateful widget life cycle

In the previous chapter, we looked at how stateful widgets differ from stateless widgets and how the build() method can be called multiple times, triggered by the setState() method.

However, there are some additional parts of the life cycle of a stateful widget that we must explore at this point because they are important to how we manage input data. They will also become increasingly important throughout the rest of this book as we look at more advanced widget interactions.

Key life cycle states

There are several life cycle states that a stateful widget can pass through. In this section, we will look at the states that you will need in most situations. Later in this book, we will introduce additional life cycle states for specific scenarios and corner cases.

Creation of the state

The creation of a state happens at the very start of the stateful widget’s life cycle, just after the constructor is called. The stateful...