Flutter booming around the market?
In the last couple of years, Flutter is booming in the market among frontend frameworks, especially for Mobile App development. At Concept Reply, as a young company, we are always open to exploring such promising frameworks.
What is Flutter?
Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, desktop, and embedded devices from a single codebase.
According to Statista, Flutter is the most popular cross-platform mobile framework by developers worldwide. It also states that 39% of coders use Flutter, which is a 9% increase from last year.
Some related statistics from Github:
· Flutter has a steady in-flow of 30K developers every year, which is double the amount of React-native.
· Based on the last three years' trend on Github, Flutter has 3 times more takers than React Native.
Here are some of the famous apps developed with Flutter https://flutter.dev/showcase
Within a short time span, Flutter gained a lot of attention from developers worldwide for obvious reasons. In terms of concept, it’s quite close to React.js framework. Flutter uses Dart as a programming language, having all the best features from different programming languages.
Let’s get to know this promising framework more closely:
· Declarative UI
· It uses Dart language, which is similar to JavaScript in terms of ease of coding while keeping the power of native java
· Flutter apps look and feel great, as they’re native apps
· All thanks to the Hot reload feature, make changes in the UI code, and see the change in the blink of an eye
· It is quick to create UI and animations in Flutter
· Saving us a lot of development time
It’s all about Widgets!
Everything in Flutter is a Widget. Widgets are the basic building block of Flutter. Therefore, in Flutter a Button, Image, Text and everything you see in the UI is a Widget.
There are two types of Widgets:
1. Stateless Widget — As the name suggests, these widgets don’t contain any state and remain static throughout their life cycle.
2. Stateful Widget — These widgets contain their own state and get rebuilt when their state changes.
Is Stateful Widget enough to manage the state of your app?
Not at all. A stateful widget only manages the state of your Widget. When you need to share the data to multiple widgets. When the complexity of your app increases, it’s important to go for the state management library like Redux, Mobx, or Bloc. Using Redux or Mobx in Flutter is exactly the same as using them in React.js or other frameworks. Bloc is specifically designed for Dart, Flutter, and AngularDart.
If Flutter is just a UI kit, how would I access native platform features?
For native platform features, like accessing the location, camera, or accessing other sensors, you have a number of packages available to use them as per your need on pub.dev with over 18000 packages available for Flutter.
We talked about UI and State management, now let’s look into Testing.
For testing, the important aspects we need to cover are -
· Unit testing
· Widget testing (for other frameworks it’s component testing)
· Integration testing
Flutter comes with rich support for writing automated tests like Unit testing, Widget testing and Integration testing, which is the most important aspect for any frontend framework. Writing automated tests plays a vital role in ensuring the quality of the product.
A little bit CI/CD tools to play with will be nice
Flutter has a number of Continuous Integration (CI) services like Codemagic, Fastlane, Appcircle, Travis, Cirrus, Bitrise etc. It enables us to deploy our apps to different stores much easier.
Conclusion
The dart language with its features such as hot reload, syntax simplicity, having component/ widget structure (React.js), and State management libraries (redux and Mobx) are widely used in frontend projects. One code base for all platforms is well enough to attract attention, and the performance is nearly close to native apps (for mobile apps). Based on our experience with mobile and web apps with different use cases, Flutter is already booming in the market and it is going to attract more market share in the future, based on what it already has to offer and the efforts by Flutter team to make it more powerful. Flutter is among the most active repository on Github and we at Concept Reply are happy to jump on this interesting new way of developing our client solutions by cutting the development cost without compromising the quality.
