Flutter-the rising technology
“Apps take flight with flutter”
Flutter is a new app development technology.
That will be an understatement for flutter.
Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit created by Google. It is used to develop applications for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, Google Fuchsia and the web from a single codebase
And that’s the proper definition of flutter.
I have been using various technologies whether in hackathons or projects but as far as I have experienced flutter is the one in which development is so easy. Moreover, my PC gets heated up :-( while using Android studio, and majority of times it gets hanged. Later, I got to know that we can implement flutter even using VS Code and with dedicated extensions for dart and flutter. And seriously, it became so interesting to develop apps with flutter that from a Web developer I shifted to App development(this statement was not meant to demotivate web developers ;-)). Ok, that was my personal view on Flutter. Let’s know about the tech in detail.
Architecture
- Dart Platform
- Flutter engine
- Foundation Library
- Design-specific widgets
1. Dart Platform
Flutter apps are written in dart language. For C or C++ developers, it would look very similar. Even if you have a basic understanding of Object-Oriented Programming in any high-level language, I am pretty sure it will hardly take you any time to get the hold of dart, as well as app development using flutter.
Below is a very basic implementation of Hello World using dart.
That’s the output.
You can run your dart snippets on:
https://dartpad.dev/ (I prefer this)
To get detailed info about the Dart Platform, click here!
2. Flutter Engine
Flutter’s engine, written primarily in C++, provides low-level rendering support using Google’s Skia graphics library.
The Flutter Engine is a portable runtime for hosting Flutter applications. It implements Flutter’s core libraries, including animation and graphics, file and network I/O, accessibility support, plugin architecture, and a Dart runtime and compile toolchain. Most developers will interact with Flutter via the Flutter Framework, which provides a modern, reactive framework, and a rich set of platform, layout, and foundation widgets.
3. Foundation library
The foundation library, written in Dart, provides the lowest level most basic classes and functions that are utilized to construct higher layers for application development. If the app is the building then the foundation library is the Wood, cement, aggregates, metals, bricks, concrete, clay.
4. Design-specific widgets
The Flutter contains two sets of widgets(I will describe them in later articles) that conform to specific design languages. Material Design widgets implement Google’s design language of the same name, and Cupertino widgets imitate Apple’s iOS design.
Quite bulky to absorb right?
In the simplest words, widgets are like clay containers. You want a container with columns, that’s a widget. In a web developer’s language, the different HTML containers are widgets in Flutter. In web you have DOM, here you have Scaffold.
Don’t worry, we will discuss all that in detail. ;-)
My next post will be on Widgets. If you want anything specific please mention in the comments below. THANKS, for your time. Keep coding!!
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