Flutter and Dart Cookbook

Chapter 7. Introducing the Flutter Framework

In this chapter, we begin our journey with the Flutter framework and focus on some of the fundamentals of Flutter.

For me, the best place to start a Flutter application is with a diagram of how your application will look and operate. If you come from a design background, you may be more familiar with the term wireframe. In either instance, we want to build a representative version of the application design.

Once you are more comfortable building out interfaces with Flutter, a good source of inspiration can be found on sites such as dribbble.com. I generally look at sites like this to figure out how a design could come together and then map out the requirement via a series of images (i.e., wireframes).

The Flutter team has your back, as they provide a wide range of templates to get you started coding your application. Once you have a starter code, it’s time to understand the difference between stateful and stateless widgets, which will be a continual question as you build out your designs. Thankfully, Flutter’s ability to create ever more complex interfaces means this investment in time really pays off.

When talking about Flutter, we really need to understand widgets and how they are used to render on-screen components. We start off by discussing mocking an interface and creating a boilerplate Flutter application before defining what a widget is; then we look at how widgets are used to make (compose) a user interface. Finally, we ...