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

Input widgets and forms

The ability of your app to manage gestures is a good starting point for interaction with the user, but for many apps, you also need a way to get other types of input from a user. Getting user data is what allows for custom content and customization in your app.

Flutter provides many input data widgets to help developers get different kinds of information from the user. We saw some of them in Chapter 5, Building Your User Interface through Widgets, including TextField, and different kinds of Selector and Picker widgets.

Getting input through the onChanged callback

A TextField widget lets the user enter text with a keyboard. The TextField widget exposes the onChanged parameter, which takes a function and can be used to listen for changes in its current value. This is the simplest way to track the text within TextField and behaves much like the onPressed example we saw earlier in this chapter:

TextField(
  onChanged: (text) {
  ...