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Practical Flutter : improve your mobile development with Google’s latest open-source SDK
Zammetti F., Apress, New York, NY, 2019. 416 pp. Type: Book (978-1-484249-71-0)
Date Reviewed: Jul 27 2020

One of the reasons a business may develop an application for mobile devices is for its branding and digital presence. In today’s market, that requires making the application available for both Android and iOS. The traditional way to accomplish this is to develop two separate applications that perform the same functions but conform to the look and feel of the given operating system (OS), as well as take advantage of native optimizations. Alternative methods are available to implement the underlying logic in a common code base and wrap the user interface into a WebView, which relies on the OS to render the user interface components, but possibly at a cost to performance.

To answer the need for a common code base that avoids the performance issues by rendering the user interface components in its own engine, Google developed Flutter. It is a user interface toolkit that provides a set of design widgets for each OS and renders them from its built-in rendering engine (Skia). It will eventually support web and desktop applications as well. It is intended to enable developers to provide beautiful, well-functioning applications while supporting multiple devices in one code base.

Zammetti’s book introduces Flutter and walks the reader through several projects to demonstrate the elements that make up a Flutter application. The source code for these projects can be downloaded from the publisher’s website (https://www.apress.com/gp/book/9781484249710).

Before discussing the projects, the author provides information about what Flutter is composed of: the Dart platform, the foundation library, the Flutter engine, and widgets. He also discusses the pros and cons of using Flutter, and walks the reader through setting up and building a “Hello World” application in Android Studio.

It is useful to know that a Flutter application is mostly a hierarchy of objects known as widgets. These widgets are implemented as classes in the Dart programming language. The remaining first half of the book introduces the basics of the Dart language and presents the widgets and application programming interfaces (APIs) that are built into Flutter.

The second half of the book covers three projects: FlutterBook, FlutterChat, and FlutterHero. For each project, the author discusses purpose and design and then introduces relevant concepts as he walks the user through the implementation.

FlutterBook is a personal information management application and includes notes, tasks, appointments, and contacts. The purpose of this application is to introduce state management, navigation, data storage, and configuration, as well as using various widgets to implement the user interface.

The next project, FlutterChat, is a communication application that provides a way for users to set up and invite users to chat rooms for messaging. To provide the communication, the author demonstrates how to build a server in Node and use socket.io to allow the communication to be implemented. The client code is used to introduce more widgets that were not used in the FlutterBook project.

Finally, FlutterHero, a Frogger-type game, introduces the reader to game architecture, extending objects from a base class, positioning widgets, animation, and audio. It is also intended to introduce an element of fun to the book.

In conclusion, Practical Flutter sets out to introduce the reader to Flutter and how it can be used to develop mobile applications. The intended reader is someone who knows how to program and wants to learn about Flutter, whether they are a student or a practitioner. As the title suggests, the projects provide the reader with some practical applications that can be used on a mobile device. It is a relevant book because it works through real-world examples and provides a cohesive explanation that might not be evident when reading through the online documentation.

More reviews about this item: Amazon

Reviewer:  Julia Yousefi Review #: CR147024 (2012-0277)
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Object-Oriented Design Methods (D.2.2 ... )
 
 
Frameworks (D.3.3 ... )
 
 
Human Factors (H.1.2 ... )
 
 
Software Development (K.6.3 ... )
 
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