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What Is Flutter and Should You Use It for App Development

Mon.23.11.2020 BY Admin
What is Flutter


As a software developer, you have probably found yourself in a situation that you wanted to develop an app for both of the world’s leading OSs - iOS and Android. Once you chose to do so, you could see that the two systems are so vastly different that you’d essentially have to choose which one to approach first, as there isn’t an overarching, catch-all solution to this problem. Or, should we say, there wasn’t before Flutter.

What is Flutter?

You might have heard of Flutter before, but if not, then you’ve come to the right place. So what is Flutter? Officially, Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. Sounds all fine and dandy, but what does this exactly mean? Essentially, it means that a single application, written only once, will work on both iOS and Android alike. By using Flutter, developers are basically creating a native application for both platforms.
In order to do so, Google made Flutter with two essential parts: an SDK and a Framework. An SKD (Software Development Toolkit) is a set of tools that developers you to create their applications. The SDK here includes tools that compile the code into native machine code for both major mobile OSs. Flutter comes with a so-called, Framework as well, which is a UI library based on widgets. It consists of a collection of UI elements that developers can use as they wish (buttons, text inputs, sliders, etc.) Using the Flutter framework, developers can customize and personalize apps as they wish.

How does it work?

Ok, so now that you have an idea of what Flutter is, you may find yourself asking: “Well, how do I do it?” To develop with Flutter, you’ll need to learn a new programming language called Dart. It’s a programming language developed by Google for its internal use. Google developed Dart to build web, server, and mobile applications, but since its inception, it has gained traction and developed and improved significantly.

Dart is an object-oriented programming language in terms of syntax similar to Java. This means that you won’t have too many issues switching over to Dart if you have some experience in Java or JavaScript. While this is a blessing for experienced developers who have similar programming languages before, it is a curse for novel developers who are just learning to code. Since Flutter is such a new programming language that has only been around publicly since Google announced it in 2018, it might be hard to find quality courses or books that would help you learn the language. On the other hand, Google has put substantial effort into creating extensive documentation for Dart on its official website, which at least somewhat flattens the learning curve.

Dart is an open-source language, so you can use it in any way you want. It’s a Google service, which means that you can count on the giant for support. Also, since Google developed it, you can expect it to run flawlessly on the Google Cloud Platform. Dart has proven to be much faster in terms of speed than JavaScript, for instance, which is another amazing feature. Dart is also a type-safe programming language, which means that you’ll be able to find errors during the compilation process, unlike JavaScript, which is not a type-safe language as you find problems and errors only at runtime.
On the other hand, as said before, it’s a fairly new language, so it can be quite hard to learn for new developers who have not yet encountered OOP. It’s still very rarely used on the market, but it’s been observed that both Flutter and Dart have only gained popularity since their launch, which indicates that the popularity will surely rise. If you jump on the bandwagon, you can probably expect Dart developers to be in high demand in a few years, increasing your market value. Another thing that ties together with the recentness of Dart is the scarcity of online resources. If you encounter an issue that you cannot solve yourself and try searching for an easy fix online, you may not find anything useful. It’s all still quite new, and it might take some time to form a significant community online which will passively develop problem-solving resources.

That said, let’s go back to Flutter.

What are Flutter widgets?

Flutter widgets is what makes Flutter so great. Each element on a screen of the Flutter app is a widget. What you see on the screen completely depends on which widgets and in which order were chosen to build the app. Let’s take a closer look at the widgets and see what they are and how they work.
Flutter widgets can be separated into 14 major categories. Categories are divided based on functionality. Here is the complete set of categories:
Accessibility - this category includes widgets like ExcludeSemantics, MergeSemantics, and Semantics, which all make a Flutter app more easily accessible;
Animation and Motion - this set of widgets bring, well, motion, and animation to your app. Through them, you can make your app more interactive;
Assets, Images, and Icons - this set of widgets allows you to manage assets, display images, and show icons;
Async - FutureBuilder, and StreamBuilder allows you to provide async functionality to your Flutter application;
Basics - this category includes widgets like Column, Container, and Text, which are the core basics of any app. As the category name suggests, these are widgets that you absolutely need to know about before starting to build any Flutter app;
Cupertino - once again, as the title suggests, this is a set of widgets designed to be used with the Cupertino giant - Apple. Here you’ll find everything you need, such as buttons, sliders, and text editors, in line with Apple’s design choices;
Input - this set of widgets allows you to take user input;
Interaction Models - these widgets manage touch events and route users to different places in the application;
Layout - through these widgets, you can arrange other widgets in columns, rows, grids, and many other layouts;
Material Components - what Cupertino is for iOS, Material Design is for Android. This set of widgets allows you to design your application in line with Google’s design principles;
Painting and Effects - this set of widgets applies visual changes to their child widgets without changing their layout or shape;
Scrolling - as the name suggests, this set of widgets provides scrollability to a set of other widgets that are not scrollable by default;
Styling - this category deals with the theme, responsiveness, and sizing of the app; and
Text - which, obviously, displays the text.
As you can see, everything is a widget in Flutter. Creating an app, therefore, using widgets, isn’t a huge problem as there is a ready widget for anything you may need.

Wrap up

Flutter is a very useful framework that is yet to develop fully. At this point, Dart is still fairly new and is still overcoming its childhood issues. However, with Google behind it, it’s on the right track to be the beast it’s meant to be. Due to its potential to create apps for both major platforms quickly and effectively, Flutter can be used to provide cheap MVPs to startups. This can prove to be multiply useful as startups, more often than not, cannot afford to employ more than one developer.

Flutter has the potential to change the way companies approach programming completely. Through Flutter, products can reach both major markets almost simultaneously, which allows companies to reach more potential users very effectively and easily. It’s an all-around phenomenal package, and we’re sure that it will continue to develop and gain a prominent role on the market.

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