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

The Scaffold widget

We have seen the Scaffold widget many times, but there are many hidden depths to the Scaffold widget that can really bring your app to life. In this section, we’ll explore some of the most used features so that you have a starting point for your apps.

Drawer

One of my favorites is the drawer parameter, which allows you to add a sidebar to your app that can slide in and out from the side of the screen on demand. You have probably seen this on other apps and assumed it would be really complicated to achieve. However, with Flutter, it is surprisingly easy. Let’s walk through an example of adding a drawer to our app.

Firstly, we need to define a global key. This allows us to refer to the scaffold directly, so we add the following line to our class:

final _scaffoldKey = GlobalKey<ScaffoldState>();

We then set the key as the parameter to Scaffold, thereby linking the key to the widget:

Scaffold(
  key: _scaffoldKey,
 ...