Introduction to Flutter

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Introduction to Flutter

Flutter is Google’s UI Mobile Framework that Provides a Fast and Expressive way to develop apps. It is a Cross-Platform Framework because it allows developers to create applications in android and iOS, web, and desktop using a single code base. We need to write code once and we can use it among them.

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 frameworks are known as cross-platform development tools.

The cross-platform development framework has the ability to write one code and can deploy on various platforms (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 from Facebook. Each of these frameworks has varying degrees of success in the mobile industry. In recent, a new framework has been introduced in the cross-platform development family named Flutter developed from Google.

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 by Google and is now managed by an ECMA standard. Flutter apps use the 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.

How does Flutter work?

Flutter code gets compiled directly into native code with the respective platform so for android it will compile into Java/Katlin and iOS it will compile in swift code. For the web, we can easily compile the existing code into a client experience, embed it into the browser, and then deploy it to any web server. This compilation process takes place at run time

Why flutter not something else?

1. Reactive native: it is a widely used cross-platform mobile framework. It uses JavaScript bridge to fill gaps between web application and mobile application
2. Xamarin: it is used for mobile applications. It uses c sharp and .net to achieve cross-platform com patibilty.net is paid service and learning .net /c sharp required quite a knowledge of programming language
3. Flutter: Flutter is a user-friendly language. It uses dart programming language it is simply compiled code into respective native snippets without using JavaScript bridge that why it’s very faster

What is Dart? Why does Flutter use Dart as a Programming Language?

1. Dart is AOT (Ahead of Time) compiled to fast, predictable, native code, which allows almost all of Flutter to be written in Dart. This makes Flutter fast.
2. Dart can also be JIT (Just in Time) compiled for exceptionally fast development cycles and game-changing workflow (hot reload).
3. Dart allows Flutter to avoid the need for a separate declarative layout language like XML because Dart’s declarative, programmatic layout is easy to read and visualize. i.e. we can do both UI and Business Logic using “DART”
4. Dart Team + Flutter Team As both Dart and Flutter is developed and maintained by Google, hence both Flutter Team and Dart Team work together to solve the problem.

Advantages of flutter

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

• Open Source: Flutter is an open-source toolkit from Google. It’s easily accessible from the developer forum https://docs.flutter.dev/get-started/install
• Single Codebase: It is a cross-platform framework, it allows programmers to write code once and they can use it on multiple platforms This saves a lot of time and effort, and money.
• Dart as a Programming Language: Dart includes a rich standard library, garbage collection, strong typing, generics, and async-await.
• Hot Reload and Development: This is a unique feature of Flutter, where developers can check instant changes of coding (in a few seconds). This increases the developer’s productivity and reduces the time to create a more robust app. This saves up a lot of time and costs in the overall development of the project.
• Minimal code: The Flutter app is developed using the Dart programming language, which uses JIT and AOT compilation to improve the overall start-up time, functioning and accelerates the performance. JIT provides an enhancement to the development system and refreshes the UI without any extra effort into building a new code.
• 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.
• Native App Like Performance: Flutter uses Dart programming language, which is fast, simple, and can easily 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 as compared to any other app development platform.
• Tech Community: There is a powerful feature and community of developers who continuously work to contribute to making Flutter better. It’s easier to learn the framework for newcomers. Anyone can start developing an app with help from the team. developers can raise the issues and get the result quickly.
• Use of Custom Widgets: It has an excellent user interface because Flutter offers a variety of widgets to help developers in their creation process. It makes the user interface much easier and faster. Even You can wrap one widget inside another.
• Create Apps for Mobile, Desktop, and Web: After hiring a flutter developer, you get the advantage of creating something that is highly adaptable. You can create applications for different operating systems like Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, Linux, and Web.

Disadvantages of Flutter

1. Massive File Size: Flutter applications have an above-average size. 3 MB Flutter app, on other platforms it has a weight of 500Kb. So, Google is working on it, but until it takes effect.
2. Lack of Third-party Libraries: There are so many libraries in Flutter, but it is limited, and much more needs to be added to it. The tool is still in the growing and improving phase. Hence, you will have to wait for this toll to be used or choose an alternative for long-term development.
3. Weak iOS features support: Flutter is a Google product that makes the quality of support for iOS applications worse. There are most of the SDK functions on Android work correctly, but there are problems with iOS.

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 which was the last big release before the 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 v1.9.1+hotfix.6 on October 24, 2019.

Conclusion: Is Flutter Good for Development?

We have concluded that Flutter has many more pros than cons for business as well as development teams. We can build beautiful, high-performance, and amazing cross-platform mobile applications that fit your needs and requirements. So, it is worth considering Flutter, especially if we want to develop an app both for iOS and Android. Because it is more cost-effective to hire a flutter developer than hiring two native application developers (like Android and iOS)