Flutter Introduction

Flutter Introduction
 Flutter is a UI toolkit for building fast, beautiful, natively compiled
applications for mobile, web, and desktop with one programing
language and single codebase.
 It is free and open-source.
 Initially, it was developed from Google and now manages by an ECMA
standard (before 1994, ECMA was known as “European Computer
Manufacturers Association”, after 1994, when the organization became
global, the “trademark” “ECMA” was kept for historical reasons).
 Flutter apps use Dart programming language for creating an app.
 The first version of Flutter was announced in the year 2015 at the Dart
Developer Summit. It was initially known as codename Sky and can run
on the Android OS.
 On December 4, 2018, the first stable version of the Flutter framework was
released, denoting Flutter 1.0.
 The current stable release of the framework is Flutter 3.24.0 / 6 August
2024

What is Flutter?
 In general, creating a mobile application is a very complex and
challenging task. There are many frameworks available, which provide
excellent features to develop mobile applications.
 For developing mobile apps, Android provides a native framework
based on Java and Kotlin language, while iOS provides a framework
based on Objective-C/Swift language.
 Thus, we need two different languages and frameworks to develop
applications for both OS.
 Today, to overcome form this complexity, there are several frameworks
have introduced that support both OS along with desktop apps. These
types of the framework are known as cross-platform development tools.
 The cross-platform development framework has the ability to write one
code and can deploy on the various platform (Android, iOS, and
Desktop).
 It saves a lot of time and development efforts of developers.
 There are several tools available for cross-platform development,
including web-based tools, such as Ionic from Drifty Co. in 2013,
Phonegap from Adobe, Xamarin from Microsoft, and React Native form
Facebook.
 Each of these frameworks has varying degrees of success in the mobile
industry.
 In recent, a new framework has introduced in the cross-platform
development family named Flutter developed from Google.

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Flutter Introduction

Introduction to Flutter
 Flutter is a UI toolkit for creating fast, beautiful, natively compiled
applications for mobile, web, and desktop with one programing
language and single codebase.
 It is free and open-source.
 It was initially developed from Google and now manages by
an ECMA standard.
 Flutter apps use Dart programming language for creating an app.
 The dart programming shares several same features as other
programming languages, such as Kotlin and Swift, and can be trans-
compiled into JavaScript code.
 Flutter is mainly optimized for 2D mobile apps that can run on both
Android and iOS platforms.
 We can also use it to build full-featured apps, including camera, storage,
geolocation, network, third-party SDKs, and more.

What makes Flutter unique?

 Flutter is different from other frameworks because it neither
uses WebView nor the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) widgets
that shipped with the device.
 Instead, it uses its own high-performance rendering engine to draw
widgets.
 It also implements most of its systems such as animation, gesture, and
widgets in Dart programing language that allows developers to read,
change, replace, or remove things easily.
 It gives excellent control to the developers over the system.

WebView

 A webview is a browser engine that's embedded within an app, allowing

the app to display web content without using a traditional web browser.
 Webviews are often used to display web pages within apps, such as
login pages, privacy policies, and web-based apps. They can enhance
user interactions by eliminating the need to switch between apps.
 Webviews are most common in mobile apps, but can be found in all
kinds of applications, including desktop apps. Some examples of
webviews include:
 Android System WebView: Based on Google Chrome, this is part of the
Android operating system and allows Android app developers to display
web content within their apps.
 Apple's WebView: Based on Apple's Safari browser, this is used on Apple
devices.

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 Microsoft Edge WebView2: This is another example of a webview.

 Webviews also allow programmers to write most of an app using HTML,
JavaScript, and CSS, which are the standard web programming tools.

Features of Flutter
 Flutter gives easy and simple methods to start building beautiful mobile
and desktop apps with a rich set of material design and widgets.

Open-Source: Flutter is a free and open-source framework for developing

mobile applications.

Cross-platform: This feature allows Flutter to write the code once, maintain, and
can run on different platforms. It saves the time, effort, and money of the
developers.

Hot Reload: Whenever the developer makes changes in the code, then these
changes can be seen instantaneously with Hot Reload. It means the changes
immediately visible in the app itself. It is a very handy feature, which allows the
developer to fix the bugs instantly.

Accessible Native Features and SDKs: This feature allows the app development
process easy and delightful through Flutter's native code, third-party
integration, and platform APIs. Thus, we can easily access the SDKs on both
platforms.

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Minimal code: Flutter app is developed by Dart programming language,

which uses JIT and AOT compilation to improve the overall start-up time,
functioning and accelerates the performance. JIT enhances the development
system and refreshes the UI without putting extra effort into building a new one.

Widgets: The Flutter framework offers widgets, which are capable of

developing customizable specific designs. Most importantly, Flutter has two
sets of widgets: Material Design and Cupertino widgets that help to provide a
glitch-free experience on all platforms.

Advantage of Flutter
Flutter fulfils the custom needs and requirements for developing mobile
applications. It also offers many advantages, which are listed below.

 It makes the app development process extremely fast because of the

hot-reload feature. This feature allows us to change or update the code
are reflected as soon as the alterations are made.
 It provides the smoother and seamless scrolling experiences of using the
app without much hangs or cuts, which makes running applications
faster in comparison to other mobile app development frameworks.
 Flutter reduces the time and efforts of testing. As we know, flutter apps
are cross-platform so that testers do not always need to run the same set
of tests on different platforms for the same app.
 It has an excellent user interface because it uses a design-centric
widget, high-development tools, advanced APIs, and many more
features.
 It is similar to a reactive framework where the developers do not need
to update the UI content manually.
 It is suitable for MVP (Minimum Viable Product) apps because of its
speedy development process and cross-platform nature.

Disadvantages of Flutter
 The Flutter is a comparatively new language that needs continuous
integration support through the maintenance of scripts.
 It provides very limited access to SDK libraries. It means a developer does
not have a lot of functionalities to create a mobile application. Such
types of functionalities need to be developed by the Flutter developer
themselves.

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 The Flutter apps do not support the browser. It only supports Android and
iOS platforms.
 It uses Dart programming for coding, so a developer needs to learn new
technologies. However, it is easy to learn for developers.

History of Flutter
 Flutter is a free and open-source UI software development kit introduced
by Google.
 It is used to build applications for Android, iOS, Windows, and the web.
 The first version of Flutter was announced in the year 2015 at the Dart
Developer Summit. It was initially known as codename "Sky" and can run
on the Android OS.
 After the announcement of Flutter, the first Flutter Alpha version (v-0.06)
was released in May 2017.
 Later, during the keynote of Google Developer days in Shanghai,
Google launched the second preview of Flutter in September 2018 that
was the last big release before Flutter 1.0 version.
 On December 4, 2018, the first stable version of the Flutter framework was
released at the Flutter Live event, denoting Flutter 1.0.
 The current stable release of the framework is Flutter 3.24.0 / 6 August
2024

Prerequisite
Before learning Flutter in-depth, you must have a sound understanding of Dart
programming, Android Studio, and web scripting languages such as HTML,
JavaScript, and CSS.

Concept Flutter

Develop By It is first introduced by Google.

Release May 2017

Programming Language It uses Dart language to create a mobile app.

Architecture Flutter uses Business Logic Component (BLoC)

architecture.

User Interface It uses custom widgets to build the UI of the app.

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Documentation Flutter documentation is good, organize, and more

informative. We can get everything that we want to be
written in one place.

Performance The performance of the Flutter application is fast. Flutter

compiles the application by using the arm C/C++ library
that makes it closer to machine code and gives the app a
better native performance.

Testing Flutter provides a very rich set of testing features. This

feature allows the developer to perform unit testing,
integration testing, and widget testing.

Community Support It has less community support as compared to React

Native.

Hot Reload Supported

Popularity 159K stars on GitHub (January 2024)

Latest Version Flutter 3.24.0 / 6 August 2024

Industry Adoption GoogleAds, Hamilton, Reflectly, Xianyu

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