Flutter is a mobile development SDK and an open source project currently in beta. It is developed by Google. It helps you build fast, beautiful and cross platform mobile application. It uses a new language called Dart.
What is Dart?
Dart is a programming language influenced by Java and JavaScript.
Advantage
One of the biggest advantages of Flutter is Reactive views and Widgets. Flutter provides Reactive views without need for the javascript bridge. It improves the performance significantly. Everything is Widget
Flutter in React Native ?
Flutter has used Modern Reactive Framework. Flutter has improved hot reload, easy styling, simple navigation, use of widgets and easy firebase integration. Development in Flutter is comparatively faster. Many features of Flutter are inspired by React Native.
Key Features
Hot Reload: Flutter’s version of hot reload really ease the effort and makes the development process enjoyable. It is already present in React Native.
Smart widgets: If a single widgets has an error in processing, only that widgets and its child will get affected. All other widget will render just fine. In place of affected widgets, the error message is displaced.
Everything is a widget: In Flutter, Everything is a widget nested inside the another widget. It comes with beautiful, customisable widgets and we can control the behaviour of each widget and also styling becomes easy.
Flutter can run both IOS stimulators and Android emulators simultaneously by using the command “flutter run -d all” .This command will run the app in all your open emulators without any visible performance lag.
Need to be Improved
The app just stops and wont show any error message if there is an conflict with firebase dependencies in android.
Flutter is still in alpha, You need to be very careful before upgrading. In future some things might change.
Basic animation mentioned in document of flutter works fine. Could not find many resources for adding custom animation.
Takeaways
We can build our entire app UI by using widgets. Widgets tree will be very useful to track each component of you app. I believe Flutter is going to be major platform for mobile app development.
–
Saravanakumar B,
Android Development Team,
Mallow Technologies.