Flutter: is the framework everyone is talking about, but why? While we have been recommending purely native development for a long time, due to the lack of satisfactory results with cross-platform development, Flutter is now trying to get its act together. What does it bring to breathe new life into the world of mobile app development?
What is Flutter?
Flutter is Google’s framework for cross-platform development. Therefore, it allows you to develop an application once for the different platforms: iOS and Android. It comes with a wide variety of modern concepts that allow you to develop the layout and functionality of an application in a fast and quite comfortable way. It is free and open source. It is based on the DART programming language (originally called Dash), also created by Google and presented to the public in 2011. It is a programming language that allows you to develop the interface from code and also has features of modern languages.
What are the particularities?
Flutter has several main specificities, one of them being skia.
What is Skia?
The latter is a graphics library or 2D graphics engine. Making an application 100% native and having a fast performance on screen unlike other web-based solutions that need a JavaScript interpreter or a web view to run.
It also offers a set of ready-made user interfaces to create applications that Flutter calls widgets. These would be the visual elements as well as the functional elements of the application.
Another specificity and perhaps the most important are the widgets.
What are widgets:
Widgets are each visual and functional part of an interface, which when put together form the mobile application. That is to say, a widget can define a structural element such as a button, a menu, a style element such as fonts or even some aspects of the layout such as paddings. Widgets are the equivalent of React or Vue components. Flutter provides a huge set of widgets that are increasing over time. Google has a YouTube channel dedicated to this framework where for each widget that appears they create a video, which helps a lot to see it and understand what it is about and put it into practice.
Styles and appearance:
Related to styles, as we know, Android and iOS have their own styles, which is why Flutter comes with Material Design and Cupertino, which are easily customizable so you don’t need to write code from the beginning.
Let’s talk about dart :
We must know it if we want to create applications with Flutter. This is a programming language created by Google. It tends to have some characteristics similar to other languages such as Java, or C#. Which makes it a simple language to learn if you already know other languages that are dedicated to the world of mobile development. In fact, these languages like Java and C # already allow you to create mobile applications. Dart has been a key point in the development of Flutter, since thanks to its features it has been possible to have the current development environment. Flutter compiles to native code and can transpile to JavaScript which allows it to run on mobile devices in desktop applications and also on the web. Dart supports two types of compilation.
Just in time compiled y Ahead of time compiled which allows you to have a better experience and speed when developing with a feature called Hot Reload, which allows you to see the changes in less than a second while you run your code. In addition, Dart has support in the most popular editors such as: JetBrains and Visual Studio Code. And many more.
Advantages of Using Flutter:
- very good performance, close to native.
- Elements that don’t exist in Flutter can be created by bridges to native code in Swift or Kotlin.
- Less code for the same result natively.
- Possibilities to integrate animations more easily.
- Documentation is very well done.
- Extremely fast compilation: the application is automatically reloaded when the code is modified almost instantly
- Less expensive maintenance: a single application fixes in case of error.
Disadvantage of using flutter:
- An additional language.
- The technology is still young.
- Knowledge of at least one of the native operating systems is required.
- New annual features of each operating system are not necessarily implementable at the time of its release.
Conclusion
Flutter is a powerful tool for cross-platform mobile app development. With a relatively low learning curve and a large supportive community, Flutter is here to stay and is a must-have if you want to become a mobile app developer or if you are constantly upgrading.