Flutter Succinctly

With the rapid rise of cross-platform mobile frameworks such as Ionic, React Native, and Xamarin, the folks at Google decided to step into the game and develop their own framework with support for both Android and iOS using the same codebase—this is how Flutter came to be.

Flutter is an open-source mobile application development SDK primarily developed and sponsored by Google, used for developing applications for Android and iOS—as well as being the primary method of creating applications for the Google Fuchsia operating system.

Flutter is written in C, C++, and Dart, and uses the Skia Graphics Engine. It offers a rich set of fully customizable widgets for building native interfaces, including the beautiful Material Design library and Cupertino (iOS-flavored) widgets, rich motion APIs, smooth natural scrolling, platform awareness, and hot reload—which helps to quickly build UIs without losing state on emulators, simulators, and any hardware for iOS and Android.

All these great features have helped Flutter take off very quickly, and developers are flocking to the framework. It’s also one of the trending projects in GitHub, which has helped it gain even more popularity.

With Flutter gaining momentum, it seems unlikely that it will fade away anytime soon, so I decided to give it a whirl and write an application with it. My personal experience: I was blown away. I felt immediately productive, even though I had never programmed in Dart before.

Throughout this book, I want to go on that same journey with you. We’ll do this by creating a fully functional app, which will allow you to get a good grasp of the framework—whether you are coming from another mobile development framework, or have no previous mobile development experience.

I’m quite excited to embark on this journey with you. I hope that by the end of it, you’ll have a great impression of the framework and be able to assess whether Flutter is the right choice for your mobile development needs. So, without further ado, let’s get going.