In 2014 there was no Flutter, but there was a so-called browser war. Developers of Google Chrome were thinking about how to optimize their browser. This led to the team deciding to cut CSS out of the browser which showed a very big increase in performance.
Realizing that it must be somehow used expand into what we call Flutter technology now. In our article we will cover topics such as what Flutter is and when and how to use Flutter for building beautiful mobile applications in a short time.
What is Flutter?
Flutter was introduced and developed by Google as an open-source technology for coding and creating native apps for Android and iOS. Flutter is relatively new technology as it was officially Launch in December 2018 as the first version 1.0 at the Flutter Live event.
Flutter combines ease of development with performance similar to native application performance while maintaining visual consistency between platforms. Flutter’s programming language, Dart, was initially consideration as a replacement for JavaScript. Most importantly, Flutter is open-source technology and completely free. Right Now, Flutter has equal popularity with React Native on both GitHub and Stack Overflow. Google Developers uses Flutter for various Google Assistant modules and the Google Home Hub user interface. Moreover, there are 50,000 Flutter apps available in the Google Play Store, and this number is increasing at a high rate day by day. Alibaba Group, eBay, Groupon, and other popular e-commerce providers use Flutter as well to give their web and mobile applications static looks.
How Flutter Works: Widget Strategy and Dart Programming Language
The Flutter framework, written in the Dart programming language, has the Flutter engine, Foundation library, and widgets. The approach to development in Flutter differs from others by its declarative UI(User Interface) writing. Here, there is a need to start from the end, meaning before starting the development of some element, the user needs to have in mind a complete visualization picture of what kind of UI it will be. Many developers differentiate this UI writing as a more clear one, but it also causes certain difficulties for developers at first.
The main reason of Flutter is that developers can build the entire user interface by simply combining different widgets. The application interface consists of various widgets, which can be any object. This concern to anything from buttons to padding, and by combining widgets, the developer can customize the application radically. Widgets can influence each other and use built-in functions to respond to external changes. Widgets are very important elements of the user interface(UI) and comply with the design specifications of Android, iOS and conventional web applications.
With the help of Flutter, developers can create custom widgets, which can be easily combined with existing ones. Note, there are no OEM widgets, but Flutter Gallery provides developers with their own ready-made widgets, a set of application examples that show how to use standard widgets which can look like same as native Android and iOS design languages.
Flutter also provide the features to developers that they can view widgets in a reactive style. For the record, Flutter programing language isn’t the first one to do this but Flutter is the only mobile SDK that offers a reactive look without the need for a JavaScript. Moreover, Dart comes with a repository of software packages to upgrade the capabilities of applications. For example, it provide several packages that help to access Firebase so that developers can create serverless applications. Some other package allows access to the Redux data warehouse or facilitates access to platform services and equipment such as cameras.
Benefits of Flutter
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Quick code development
Flutter developers wanted to invent a technology with the quickest opportunity to deliver a great-performing, cross-platform mobile application. The following features allow this:
- Hot reload. Flutter’s hot reloading helps save time while developing by letting the developer see the applied changes in presents. This capability helps Flutter developers be importantly more efficient and productive. It permit the developer to pause code execution, make changes to the code, and continue the code from the same place. This greatly speeds up development and allows more test.
- Widgets. One of the most important benefits of Flutter is how it uses ready-made widgets. This guarantee that Flutter offers a consistent model for development and design. Widgets are developed by Google, so they are high code quality and perform better than other open-source frameworks. As most of them are tremendously customizable, they save developers’ time like no other framework.
- Minimal code and access to native features. Flutter lets developers use Dart, which is compiled directly into the ARM code of mobile devices and helps not only to speed up and boost up applications, it allows them to launch quickly also.
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Great UI
Will Larche, Software Engineer at Google, says, “Flutter’s architecture is designed for building beautiful, custom User Interface. Flutter’s main Aim is to make building polished, custom app interfaces a faster, more delightful experience for designers and developers. Flutter is powerful programing language enough to draw anything designers dream up.”
- Beautiful, custom design. The most powerful thing of Flutter is Skia, the open-source, high-performance graphics engine used by Adobe, Chrome, and Amazon Kindle. Flutter allows developers to develop applications with custom designs, which will look equally good on iOS and Android devices. Applications developed on Flutter unlike its competitors have no risk that there will UI failures when updating the software.
- Same business logic and UI. Possible for Flutter sharing the User Interface and business logic on Android and Apple devices allow developers to achieve a seamless experience regardless of the OS. This is fundamentally important for brands with a unique and outstanding corporate style.
Flutter doesn’t need any platform-specific User Interface components to render its UI. - UI customization potential. A big advantage of Flutter is the ability to customize everything you see on screen, regardless of the complexity of the element. The amount of effort required is primarily lower from that required on native platform development software
Why Choose Flutter on Your Next Project
There are things that are of great value to the business — platform steadiness, its performance, a guarantee of successful support, and improvement of technologies and products. Any problems and imperfection in any of these aspects may lead to risks, including direct and indirect financial losses.
- The best in cross-platform performance and resource consumption because of compilation of native code and high-performance rendering engine. The first provides an easy and best way of establishing communication between platform-native code and Dart through platform channels. Thus, developers can implement into a Flutter mobile application anything that a native application can do, just with a little more effort on the native side. Due to the engine, a UI built in Flutter can be launched on virtually any platform, assuming this platform supports Flutter. Putting it differently, flutter developers no longer have to adjust the User Interface to transfer it to a platform, which simplifies the development process tremendously.A good UX is greatly dependent on the performance of the application. Flutter mobile application performance in most cases will be identical from the native application. This is because Flutter doesn’t rely on intermediate code representations or clarification.
- Better developer productivity is achieved due to Flutter being fundamentally designed for quicker code writing. It contain of ready-to-use widgets, its syntax requires less code to be written, and hot reload speeds increase the searching for and correction of bugs. All this results in hardly any man-hours for developers.
- Quicker time to market. Due to the significant productivity of Flutter developers, it takes less time to create an application, which means that compared to other programming languages and frameworks, applications in Flutter are written quicker and enter the market earlier with equal effort. Thus, the less coding and support effort needed, the quick the time to market.
- Low-cost app development. Flutter provides well structure development work and, accordingly, to develop an application requires less man-hours. The cost of the Mobile application on Flutter is lower than when using other cross-platform languages or native development.
Flutter’s Downsides
While Flutter has a lot of advantages in some areas in which it still needs work.
- Lack of third-party libraries. Flutter programing language is a newer technology. As such, the volume of third-party libraries currently available for Flutter is finite. Third-party libraries help speed up development time remarkably, so this is a definite downside to developing in Flutter.
- Large file size. Many, if not most, of the apps developed through Flutter are impending for mobile devices only. Although current mobile devices have large storage capacities, file size is important.
- New skills required. While Flutter is very easy and simple to use and can be learned by non-programmers or non-IT, it does require developers to learn Dart first. This adds an additional phase of learning, which can increase the time and cost for any project.
