Beginning Flutter

INTRODUCTION

Flutter was unveiled at the 2015 Dart Developer Summit under the name Sky. Eric Seidel (engineer director for Flutter at Google) opened his talk by saying that he was there to speak about Sky, which was an experimental project presented as “Dart on mobile.” He had built and published a demo on the Android Play Store, and he started the demo by stating that there was no Java drawing this application, meaning it was native. The first feature Eric showed was a square spinning. Driving the device at 60 Hertz was Dart, which was the first goal for the system: to be fast and responsive. (He wanted to go much faster [i.e., 120 Hertz], but he was restricted by the capability of the device he was using.) Eric went on to show multitouch, fast scrolling, and other features. Sky provided the best mobile experience (for users and developers); the developers took lessons from working on the Web, and they thought they could do better. The user interface (UI) and the business logic were both written in Dart. The goal was to be platform‐agnostic.

Fast‐forward to 2019, and Flutter now is powering Google's smart display platform including the Google Home Hub and is the first step toward supporting desktop apps with Chrome OS. The result is that Flutter supports desktop apps running on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Flutter is described as a portable UI framework for all screens like mobile, web, desktop, and embedded devices from a single codebase.

This book teaches you how to develop mobile ...