Hey there guys, I’ve been working with flutter for quite a while now. The framework brings a lot of features to the developer which didn’t exist before for fast & effective app development. During my starting phase with this “new“ technology I had a lot of difficulty understanding it’s working & features. But with time I got towards understanding all of it’s tits & bits, but I had a very hard time doing that because it was very young then. Whereas of now it’s first stable version has been released in December of last year & version 1.2-stable had been released in the MWC, held in Barcelona from the 25th – 28th of February 2019.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is a UI framework developed at/by Google. The framework was developed for allowing developers to create complex & beautiful UIs very easily & efficiently. Unlike other frameworks like ionic , React-Native , Native-Script e.t.c. which use Javascript, Flutter uses an in-house programming language developed at Google called Dart. Since Dart could be trans compiled to Javascript it was primarily used for client-side & server-side web development. For you Javascript stans reading this blog & thinking “What is this peasant language Dart?” , bear with me & the upcoming blogs we’ll also get into Dart, I hope i’ll be able to change your thinking.
For more info on Flutter goto: www.flutter.dev
Features Set
Flutter being a framework it comes with a lot of features. Some of them are as follows:
- Flutter’s render engine is written in C++ which provides low-level rendering using Google’s graphics called Skia. It additionally interface with the platform’s specific SDKs provided by said platforms like Android & iOS. This combined with the widgets set of both platforms creates a fluid experience for the user.
- The Widgets in Flutter are the UI components in the app. Flutter consists of almost every UI component in both Android & iOS, with additional components exclusive to flutter.
- Hot-Reload is another unique feature which allows the developers to see real-time changes or updates to the app in their physical device.
- Testing is another of my favourite feature of Flutter. This feature allows us to test the both UI & backend related tasks without running the app on the device.
- In the new update there has been an addition of a new debugging tool called the DevTools, though some of the of debugging tools were already present in the framework they were not accessible easily and there are new features such as widget-tree view, changing the app mode to either iOS or Android in the physical device & so on.
- Performance Profiling is another feature that has been updated, now we can see how much do certain task affect the performance of the app.
What are we going to do?
In the upcoming blog I’ll be going through Dart and Flutter developing apps which cover most of the features of Flutter such as Widgets,State Management,SorceGen, data fetching , animations, plugin-development etc. So stick around if you want to become a Flutter wizard & create some great apps with the magic you gain from this series. I’ll be posting a blog every two days in this series called “Flutter:An App Wizard“.
But since I’m starting this series for the newbies too, I’ll leave a link to another blog about dart basics which will help them to get the basics easily.Click here!
Please read it thoroughly.
And if you have any queries regarding please leave them in the comment section below.