Forem: Harshu Incorporation

Flutter: Google’s Most Ambitious Framework

Harshu Incorporation — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 15:17:27 +0000

19th Century was about the Industrial Revolution. The 20th Century was about Science and Engineering. And the 21st Century is all about Technology. The era in which we are living right now is called the Digital Age.

Today Technology is everywhere. From the Smartphone that is in your pocket to the Smartwatch that is on your wrist right now. Today Televisions are Smart, Refrigerators are smart, Air Conditioners are smart, even the car you are driving is also smart.

Since our every devices are smart and connected with each other, we need ONE PLATFORM FOR ALL DEVICES. Whether its our Smartphone, Smartwatch, Smart TV, Smart AC, Smart Car, Smart Home Products, One Platform for all of Them....

This idea is really similar to the terminology Write Once Run Everywhere, which is introduced in the late 70s. The first languages based on this terminology were Java and Python.

Since then every major company tried to release their platforms based on this terminology whether it is Ionic, React Native, Xamarin, PhoneGap or any other framework. On May 2017, Tech Giant Google Introduced one framework named Flutter which is capable of delivering native Android and iOS apps from a single code base. This was an alpha release of Flutter.

So you might have some Questions that commonly arise when anyone thinks to switch from React Native to flutter.

If React Native is pretty dominating in the market right now then why you should give a chance to flutter ??
If every major company including Facebook, Instagram, Bloomberg, Uber, Skype, and Wix uses React Native then why you should give a chance to Flutter ??
On Big Job Portals including Nokri.com, Indeed.com, Careerbuilder.com, Dice.com, and Monster.com, there are hundreds of jobs available for React Native developers but still, very less amount of jobs are available for flutter developers then why you should give a chance to flutter ??
React Native is based on the most popular tech stack JavaScript, So tutorials and community support are amazing for JavaScript, and there are lots of JavaScript developers already available in the market then why you should invest your time in learning a pretty unknown language Dart for developing apps on flutter ??
React Native is here from quite some time. So the support for react native is amazing on community sites like Stack Overflow, Quora and over the internet.

So if everything is fine with React Native why you should give a chance to flutter ?? So now Let me give the answer to your WHY ?

1. Just like others, Flutter is not just for Android and iOS

After the 1.0 release, flutter is evolving really fast. On the 1.0 release, it was only used for targeting Android and iOS just like others.
But with the release of Flutter 1.5, flutter team amazed everyone. They officially announced that from now, flutter will not only available for Android and iOS, but it will also available for Web, Desktop, and Embedded devices. Yaa they are in Preview right now, that means they are gonna launch it really soon.
So if you learn flutter you will become One Man Army, because from just one framework you will able to target every major platform. You just need to master one framework. Just imagine the power that flutter gives you. 🔥
If you wanna develop for Web flutter is here to help you.
If you wanna develop Native Android and iOS apps flutter is here to help you.
If you wanna develop apps for Windows, macOS, or Linux flutter is available for you.
And at the end, if you wanna develop apps for embedded devices such as smartwatches and smart home products, here also flutter is available for you.

2. Fuchsia OS: The Most Powerful beast in the Game.

The second and the most amazing reason to learn flutter is that in future Entire App development in Fuchsia will be done in a flutter.
We all know that Google is working on a really secret Operating System named Fuchsia.
Only the Core Google team knows the real power of Fuchsia OS. But there are really strong rumors that Fuchsia will be the cross-platform OS. That means whether it will mobile, desktop, or embedded devices, ONE OS EVERYWHERE.
And for developing apps for Fuchsia, Flutter is the way for you. And as of rumors, if fuchsia is the successor of Android then you can only imagine the wider market and high demand for flutter developers that will be coming in the next couple of years. So that’s why learning flutter really worth of your time.

3. Faster App Development

Another important reason for learning flutter is the development speed that it provides to you.
While designing the flutter framework, Google developers have a one really big advantage and challenge. They have almost 10 years of experience in App Development. So they know every pain and problem that comes in the traditional native app development.

Having experience and knowledge of the market problems is their advantage. But how to overcome those problems and create a framework that makes app development faster was a big challenge.

Today You Just ask any developer who codes one or two apps in a flutter that how fast it is to create apps in a flutter. He/she will tell you only one thing that no one can beat flutter in faster app development.

4. The Partnership of Dart and Flutter team

Dart is a language created by Google. And also Flutter is created by Google. In Google, both teams work together to optimize dart for flutter and Fuchsia.
With the recent versions of the dart, you can understand how dart team is working hard to optimize the language for Flutter. This is a really big advantage for Flutter that dart team is always there to help them in making flutter more powerful and feature-rich. None of the frameworks have this kind of advantage. That makes flutter more Powerful and Unique from others.

5. Features of Flutter

And Finally, let’s discuss the features of flutter. Flutter has four main features.

Stateful Hot Reload
Beautiful Apps
Productive
High Performance

let’s discuss each topic in detail.

Stateful Hot Reload

Flutter provides you stateful hot reload. If you have experience with the native app development then you must know how much time-consuming it is to compile the whole app.
But flutter provides you the facility of stateful hot reload. So in just fraction of seconds, you can view your changes. Just like in web development you refresh the webpage to see your changes, the same concept goes here.
For providing stateful hot reload flutter uses Dart Virtual Machine in debug mode builds to quickly inject new code.

Beautiful Apps

You can give any look you want from a design language of your choice. Flutter supports both Material Design and Cupertino Based Widgets. So apps build with flutter are naturally beautiful, you will not need much of the hard work to make them beautiful.

Productive

Flutter has rich-set of in-built function that will make your development faster and sweeter.
It has a rich set of widgets that will make your life easier and your development faster. Just try it once, you’ll love the crazy power that flutter gives you right in the box.

High Performance

For rendering widgets, Flutter uses its own high-performance 2D rendering engine named Skia.
With the help of Skia, flutter is able to provide performance over 60fps. So your animations look smoother, and your UI behaves naturally faster.

So I hope you get the answer to your WHY FLUTTER?? But still If you have any questions please feel free to ask me. And If I misses something please tell me that, I’ll love to learn from you. And believe me learning flutter will be one of the best choices you ever make.

1. Introduction to Flutter

Harshu Incorporation — Thu, 11 Nov 2021 15:52:51 +0000

Here I will not waste your time by writing here and their things. I just want to give you the basic introduction of the flutter framework in a very short and simple manner. I will try to make this article Short, Simple, and Very Specific. So that you can quickly get started with the framework.

What is Flutter ?

Flutter is an Application development framework created by Google and the community.

Type — Application Development Framework
Developers — Google and Community
Official Release — 04 December 2018
Stable Release — Flutter 2.5.3, As of Nov 11, 2021
Written In — Dart, C, C++, and Skia as Graphic Engine
Targeted Platform — Android, iOS, Fuchsia OS, Desktop, Web and Embedded Devices

Flutter Features

What makes flutter so unique and powerful is its features. Flutter has four main features.

Stateful Hot Reload
Native Performance
High Productivity
Beautiful Apps

What makes flutter unique ?

Flutter’s Technology and its working make it unique from others.

Everything in the flutter is Widget. And For drawing those widgets on the screen, flutter uses neither WebView nor the OEM widgets that shipped with the device. Instead, flutter uses its own high-performance 2D rendering engine named Skia to draw widgets on the screen. Which makes it unique and provides high performance over 60fps.

Complete Flutter framework is made with three languages: C, C++, and Dart.

The Graphics framework and virtual machine are implemented in C and C++.
For the framework and widgets flutter uses dart. Flutter implements most of its system like gestures, animations, widgets, framework, etc in a dart.
By using dart, developers can easily read, change, replace, or remove the code. This gives developers tremendous control over the system.

Flutter Drawbacks

As every technology has its own pros and cons, flutter has its own too. But here we also need to consider that flutter is still new in the market. So many amazing features, support, and solution are about to come in the nearby future. So please be optimistic and give it some time to grow.

Here I just represent some current problems that flutter faces.

1. Lack of third-party services and plugins

As flutter is very new in the market it has fewer third-party plugins and services. If you are just a student and want to learn the flutter or if your app doesn’t need much more third-party plugins then it’s okay to get your hands dirty with flutter.

But the organization never chooses any platform based on likability, they always choose a platform based on their needs. Every commercial application needs third-party plugins to fulfill its tasks, and if the platform doesn’t support that third-party service then they have to drop that platform and move to another one.

For example, Your app uses payment services, one of the most amazing services is from Strip, and for your payments need you regularly use Stripe’s services. But as flutter is still very new, Stripe doesn’t have support for flutter till now. So, in that case, you have to drop the flutter and move on to another. This is the reality and This is how industries work.

But As I say flutter is new, so just give it some time. It is too early to judge the platform’s potential. I’m sure with future updates every big third-party service will support flutter. And For now, you have exclusive support of many Google Services like maps and payments. So for now just give some time, the future will be flutter…

2. Limited Support from Stack Overflow

As flutter is new stack overflow has limited support for it. As the adoption rate of flutter goes higher support will be increased. And For now, the Flutter community is really active over the internet to help you in every situation.

So that’s it for the introduction part guys.

For Quick Summary

In this article, we get a basic understanding of flutter.

First, we understand what is a flutter. we see its release date, targeted platform, etc.
Then we quickly see flutter features.
Then we understand what makes flutter unique, we also see its architecture.
Then finally we also take a look at its current drawbacks.

As I mentioned I try to keep this article short, simple, and very precise. So you can quickly understand the basics.

I denote the number on the article so that beginners can get help about where to start and what should be the next step to learn the framework. In upcoming articles, we see more detailed stuff about flutter. For that please visit the flutter section on our publication.

Feel free to let me know if I miss something. I’ll love to learn from you. 😉

Till then Keep Loving your work, and keep working lovely. I’ll surely catch you up in the next article. 😊

Dart: The Language behind Flutter and Fuchsia OS.

Harshu Incorporation — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 11:35:13 +0000

Flutter 1.0 is officially announced on Dec 04, 2018. After that, the demand of dart programmers is gaining popularity now. Because entire flutter app development is completely based on a dart.

It seems that tech-giant Google has some big plans with the language. That’s why dart is implemented on two big projects including flutter and fuchsia OS.

Here is a quick intro of dart’s features, use-cases and its humongous power Which will give you answer why Google choose it for flutter and fuchsia OS.

Dart was first unveiled at the GOTO conference in Denmark on October 10, 2011. Dart 1.0 was released in November 2013 and Dart 2.0 was released in August 2018 with a sound type system.
Dart is a General Purpose Language originally developed by Google.

Dart is a very powerful language that you can use to write from simple scripts to full-featured native apps using flutter. It is mainly used in four platforms including Native Mobile App, Web App, Desktop App, and Server-Side App.

Designed By — Lars Bak and Kasper Lund
First appeared — October 10, 2011
Typing discipline — 1.x: Optional, 2.x: Static
License — BSD
File Extensions — .dart

Dart supports mainly five types of paradigms:

Scripting
Object Oriented
Imperative
Reflective
functional

Dart is influenced by five languages:

Dart is a member of the ALGOL language family, alongside C, C++, Java, C#, JavaScript, and others.

So if you are from C, Swift, or Java’s background you’ll feel just like hometown in a dart. Its syntax is closer to C.

C#
JavaScript
Erlang
Smalltalk
Strongtalk

It has four major implementations:

Dart VM
dart2js compiler
Flutter
Fuchsia OS

Ways to Run the Dart Code

Dart is implemented on a wide range of platforms. So it needs multiple ways to run the dart code depending on the platform. Below are three main ways to run the dart code:

Through Transcompile to JavaScript
Through DartVM
Through the AOT compilation process

Through Transcompile to JavaScript

Dart code can be compiled to JavaScript so that it can run on browsers. For that Dart uses a source-to-source compiler (dart2js) to convert its code to JavaScript.

So when you want to deploy your Dart code on browsers, first you need to convert that code via the dart2js compiler. dart2js will convert your code into JavaScript. So it can run on all modern browsers.

Here amazing thing is, dart2js will not only produce JavaScript code, instead it will produce optimized JavaScript code. That means compared to hand-written JavaScript code, your converted dart code will run faster on browsers.

Through DartVM

Just like Java has JVM, Dart has its own virtual machine for running dart code-named DartVM.

If you want to create console apps or server apps you can use DartVM to run Dart code. DartVM is a highly optimized, powerful and fast virtual machine that can run your Dart code in a fraction of seconds.

DartVM is directly coming with Dart SDK. You just need to setup SDK’s path in your environment variables and you are ready to go. Your imagination is the only limit now…

Through the AOT compilation process

AOT means Ahead-Of-Time compilation is the process of compilation in which we covert a higher-level code such as C, C++, or an intermediate code such as Java Byte Code or .NET Framework’s CIL code (Common Intermediate Language), into a native machine code which is system dependent code. And that code can be run on a particular machine that understands it.

AOT produces machine-optimized code, just like a standard native compiler.

Apps build with Flutter uses the same AOT compilation process to generate native Android and iOS apps from a single code base.

SnapShots: For faster code execution

According to Wikipedia: SnapShot is the state of a system at a particular point in time.

The same concept applies here, SnapShots are files which stores object and other runtime data.

So in the next startup whole program does not need to be compiled, the compiler will take saved data from snapshot files and compile only newly added data. Which results in faster startups and code execution.

Snapshots are a core part of DartVM.

There are two types of SnapShot files in dart:

Script snapshots
Full snapshots

Script SnapShots

Dart programs can be compiled into SnapShots files. These files contain the program code and dependencies pre-parsed and ready to execute. This allows fast start-ups.

Full SnapShots

The dart core libraries can be compiled into a snapshot file which allows fast loading of the libraries.

Dart VM have a prebuild snapshot for the core libraries which is loaded at runtime. That’s how DartVM provides faster code execution.

So, guys, these are the features and use-cases of a dart. It’s a very powerful language itself. If you’re planning to go into app-development domain then you should definitely start to learn dart and flutter. I’ll try to share as much as I can on dart and flutter. Feel free to let me know if I missed something. I’ll definitely like to learn that.

Till then Keep Coding, Keep Coding.