Book Image

Taking Flutter to the Web

By : Damodar Lohani
Book Image

Taking Flutter to the Web

By: Damodar Lohani

Overview of this book

Using a shared codebase in addition to an extensive range of tools in the Flutter ecosystem optimized for browsers, the Flutter framework has expanded to enable you to bring your mobile apps to the web. You’ll find out how web developers can leverage the Flutter framework for web apps with this hands-on guide. Taking Flutter to the Web will help you learn all about the Flutter ecosystem by covering the tools and project structure that allows you to easily integrate Flutter into your web stack. You’ll understand the concepts of cross-platform UI development and how they can be applied to web platforms. As you explore Flutter on the web, you'll become well-versed with using Flutter as an alternative UI platform for building adaptive and responsive designs for web apps. By the end of this Flutter book, you'll have built and deployed a complete Flutter app for the web and have a roadmap ready to target the web for your existing Flutter mobile apps.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Basics of Flutter Web
5
Part 2: Flutter Web under the Hood
9
Part 3: Advanced Concepts

Different types of web renderers and their advantages and disadvantages

When running and building apps for the web using Flutter, we can choose between two different renderers. In this section, we will learn what those renderers are and what the advantages and disadvantages of using each of them are.

So, what are renderers? As the name implies, they are used to render our Flutter app on the web. The two renderers that we can use to render our Flutter application on the web are the HTML renderer and the CanvasKit renderer. So, how did these renderers come to be? As we discussed in the previous section, to enable web support, the Flutter team had to rewrite the Flutter Engine on top of browser APIs. The first solution was to use HTML, CSS, and CanvasAPI on the web, which is how the HTML renderer came to be. This was the easier (and first) solution. However, later came another solution: using WebGL. For this, the team brought Skia (the underlying graphic engine that supported Flutter...