Content Source:
- developers.googleblog.com
Kotlin Vs Flutter – The future of Android Development in year 2024
Introduction
Kotlin and Flutter are two popular technologies for Android app development. While Kotlin is a native Android development language, Flutter is a hybrid app development framework based on Dart. Both have their own respective pros and cons, which you should analyze before starting the development procedure. In short, there is no clear answer to the Flutter vs. Kotlin question, and the choice depends on your specific needs and preferences.
Here are some key factors to consider when choosing between Kotlin and Flutter for Android app development in 2024:
1. Popularity and Community Support
Both Kotlin and Flutter are free and open-source technologies with active communities. Flutter has a larger dev community, active forums, and is constantly expanding. It is backed by Google and has a growing and vibrant community, with a wide range of packages and libraries available.
Kotlin, being a language primarily used for Android development, has a strong community and ecosystem specific to Android app development. It has also gained popularity, particularly in the Android development community, with many companies transitioning from Java to Kotlin for Android app development.
2. Learning Curve
Kotlin is interoperable with Java, and its syntax is quite simple and easy, showing many similarities with the existing languages such as Java and Swift for Android and iOS, respectively. This makes it easier for developers to learn and use Kotlin.
Flutter, on the other hand, has its own UI rendering engine and offers a rich set of customizable widgets, providing more control over the app’s look and feel. This can make it more challenging for developers to learn and use Flutter.
3. UI/UX Development
Flutter provides a variety of widgets, which makes platform-specific designing quick and efficient. It has a unified user experience on all platforms as it is a widget-based cross-platform framework with terrific options to customize the app.
Kotlin, being a language, doesn’t have a direct impact on UI/UX development. Developers have to use other tools and technologies to design the app’s user interface.
4. Code Sharing
Flutter allows for code sharing between different platforms, enabling developers to write once and deploy on multiple platforms. This can save time and effort in the development process.
Kotlin, being primarily used for Android development, doesn’t have the same level of code sharing capabilities.
5. Performance
Kotlin offers its users a plethora of advantages such as high-speed animation, the same language for both high and back-end needs, and a lot more. But when we compare it with Flutter, it surely lags.
Flutter is known for its hot reload functionality, thus, making it users to change easily and accordingly. Flutter goes over the edge by dint of its efficiency in the cross-platform frameworks’ efficiency race.
6. Testing
Flutter has various testing features and a unique widget testing feature. In comparison, Kotlin’s primary focus is to deliver backend development services and uses Firebase as a secure backend option.
Conclusion
In conclusion, both Kotlin and Flutter have their own strengths and weaknesses. Flutter is a better choice for cross-platform app development, provides a variety of widgets, and allows for code sharing between different platforms. Kotlin is a native Android development language, has a strong community and ecosystem specific to Android app development, and offers a simpler learning curve. The choice between the two depends on your specific needs and preferences.
For more information, please head over to our Hire Android Developer page and to develop a web application using Android, Hire Android Developer at HK Infosoft – we are destined to provide you with an innovative solution using the latest technology stacks. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”.
To develop Android Mobile Apps, please visit our technology page.
Content Source:
- Flutter Official Documentation
- Kotlin Official Documentation
No-code App Development Using FlutterFlow
Are you looking to revolutionize your app development workflow?
Look no further than FlutterFlow – an innovative visual development platform that’s taking app development to the next level with its intuitive Drag & Drop functionality. In this blog post, we’ll dive into what FlutterFlow is, its key features, and how you can use it to rapidly bring your app ideas to life.
What is FlutterFlow?
At its core, FlutterFlow is a powerful visual development platform designed to simplify and accelerate the process of building mobile and web applications. It’s built on top of Google’s Flutter framework, which is renowned for its ability to create high-quality, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase.
FlutterFlow takes the power of Flutter and adds an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, making it accessible to developers of all skill levels. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting out, you can leverage FlutterFlow to design, develop, and deploy apps without the need for extensive coding knowledge.
Key Features of FlutterFlow
1. Visual Interface: FlutterFlow offers a visual interface that lets you design your app’s user interface by simply dragging and dropping elements onto the canvas. This speeds up the design process and ensures a pixel-perfect result.
2. Widgets Gallery: The platform provides a wide range of pre-built widgets that you can customize to match your app’s design. From buttons and text fields to complex interactive components, FlutterFlow has you covered.
3. Responsive Design: Building apps that look great on various devices is essential. FlutterFlow enables you to create responsive layouts that adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes and orientations.
4. Data Binding: Connect your app’s UI to data sources easily. FlutterFlow allows you to bind data from APIs or databases to your UI components, keeping your app’s content up-to-date.
5. Collaboration: Collaborate with team members in real-time. Whether you’re a solo developer or part of a team, FlutterFlow supports seamless collaboration, enhancing productivity.
Getting Started with FlutterFlow
1. Sign Up: To get started, sign up for a FlutterFlow account. You can choose from different pricing plans based on your needs.
2. Create a New Project: Once you’re in, create a new project and choose whether you’re building a mobile or web app.
3. Design Your App: Use the visual editor to design your app’s UI. Drag and drop widgets onto the canvas, arrange them, and customize their properties.
4. Add Functionality: Use the built-in logic builder to add functionality to your app. Define interactions, create conditional statements, and more – all without writing extensive code.
5. Preview and Test: Before deploying your app, use the preview feature to test how it looks and functions. Make adjustments as needed to ensure a seamless user experience.
6. Deploy Your App: Once you’re satisfied with your app, deploy it with just a few clicks. FlutterFlow takes care of the technical details, allowing you to focus on delivering an exceptional app.
Conclusion
In the fast-paced world of app development, tools like FlutterFlow are a game-changer. They empower developers to create robust and visually stunning applications without the worry of traditional coding methods. By harnessing the power of Google’s Flutter framework and adding a user-friendly visual interface, FlutterFlow is designed to redefine how we approach app development.
So whether you’re a startup founder looking to build a prototype, a developer aiming to speed up your workflow, or someone passionate about turning your app ideas into reality, FlutterFlow has everything you need to succeed.
For more information, please head over to our Hire Flutter Developer page and to develop a custom mobile application using Flutter, Hire Flutter Developer at HK Infosoft – we are destined to provide you with an innovative solution using the latest technology stacks. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”.
Content Source:
- flutterflow.io
What’s new in Flutter 3.3
Only three months ago Google announced Flutter 3, a massive milestone that included stable support for all platforms! The good news is that the momentum since this major release has not slowed down. Since the release of Flutter 3, Flutter has merged 5,687 pull requests.
This release brings updates to Flutter web, desktop, text handling improvements in performance — and much more!
Framework
Global Selection
Until now, Flutter web apps didn’t match the expected behavior when attempting to select text. Like Flutter apps, native web applications are composed of a tree of elements. In a traditional web app, you can select multiple web elements with a single sweeping gesture, something that couldn’t be easily done on a Flutter web app.
Today that all changes! With the introduction of the SelectableArea widget, any child of the SelectableArea widget has selection enabled for free!
Pic courtesy: medium.com
To take advantage of this powerful new feature, simply wrap your route body (such as the Scaffold) with the SelectionArea widget and let Flutter do the rest.
Trackpad input
Flutter 3.3 provides improved support for trackpad input. This not only provides richer and smoother control but also reduces misinterpretation in certain cases. For an example of this misinterpretation, check out the Drag a UI element page in the Flutter cookbook. Scroll to the bottom of the page to get to the DartPad instance, and perform the following steps:
- Size the window smaller so that the upper part presents a scrollbar
- Hover over the upper part
- Use a trackpad to scroll
- Prior to installing Flutter 3.3, scrolling on a trackpad drags the item because Flutter was dispatching emulated general events
- After installing Flutter 3.3, scrolling on a trackpad correctly scrolls the list because Flutter is delivering the “scrolling” gesture, which isn’t recognized by the cards, but is recognized by the scroll view
Scribble
Flutter now supports Scribble handwriting input using the Apple Pencil on iPadOS. This feature is enabled by default on CupertinoTextField, TextField, and EditableText. To enable this feature for your end users, simply upgrade to Flutter 3.3.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
Text input
To improve support for rich text editing, this release introduces the ability to receive granular text updates from the platform’s TextInputPlugin. Previously, the TextInputClient only delivered the new editing state with no delta between the old and new, TextEditingDeltas and the DeltaTextInputClient fill this information gap. Having access to these deltas allows you to build an input field with styled ranges that expand and contract as you type.
Material Design 3
The Flutter team continues to migrate more Material Design 3 components to Flutter. This release includes updates to IconButton, Chips, and large and medium variants for AppBar.
IconButton
Pic courtesy: medium.com
Chip
Pic courtesy: medium.com
Medium and large AppBar
Pic courtesy: medium.com
Desktop
Windows
Previously, the Windows desktop application’s version was set by a file specific to the Windows application. This behavior was inconsistent with the way other platforms set their versions.
Windows desktop application versions can now be set from your projects pubspec.yaml file and build arguments. This makes it easier to enable auto updates for your end customers to get the latest and greatest when an application update is pushed.
Packages
go_router
When designing apps with complex navigation needs, things can get pretty hard to wrap your head around. To extend Flutter’s native navigation API, the team has published a new version of the go_router package, making it simpler to design routing logic that works across mobile, desktop, and the web.
The go router package, maintained by the Flutter team, simplifies routing by providing a declarative, url-based API, making it easier to navigate and handle deep-links. The latest version (4.3) enables apps to redirect using asynchronous code, and includes other breaking changes described in the migration guide.
VS Code extension enhancements
The Visual Studio Code extension for Flutter has several updates including improvements for adding dependencies. You can now add multiple, comma-separated dependencies in one step using Dart: Add Dependency.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
Performance
Raster cache improvements
This release increases the performance of loading images from assets by eliminating copies and reducing Dart garbage collection (GC) pressure. Previously, when loading asset images, the ImageProvider API required the compressed data to be copied multiple times. First, it was copied into the native heap when opening the asset and exposing it to Dart as a typed data array. Then, it was copied a second time when that typed data array was copied to the internal storage of a ui.ImmutableBuffer.
With the addition of ui.ImmutableBuffer.fromAsset, compressed image bytes can be loaded directly into the structure used for decoding. This approach requires changes to the byte loading pipeline of ImageProviders. This process is also faster because it bypasses some additional scheduling overhead required bythe previous method channel-based loader. In particular, image loading time improved by nearly 2x in our microbenchmarks.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
Stability
iOS pointer compression disabled
In the 2.10 stable release, they enabled Dart’s pointer compression optimization on iOS.Dart’s pointer compression works by reserving a large virtual memory region for Dart’s heap. Since the total virtual memory allocation allowed on iOS is less than on other platforms, this large reservation reduces the amount of memory available for use by other components that reserve their own memory, for example, Flutter plugins.
While disabling pointer compression increases the memory consumed by Dart objects, it also increases the memory available for non-Dart parts of a Flutter application, which is more desirable overall.
Apple provides an entitlement that can increase the maximum allowed virtual memory allocation for an application, however this entitlement is only supported on newer iOS versions, and wouldn’t work on devices running versions of iOS that Flutter still supports. When we are able to use this entitlement everywhere, we intend to revisit this optimization.
For more information and to develop mobile apps using Flutter, Hire Flutter Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”.
To develop Mobile Apps using Flutter, please visit our technology page.
Content Source:
- medium.com
What’s new in Flutter 3
The recent release of Flutter v3.0 is now stable for macOS and Linux, in addition to Windows!
There are several exciting things coming as part of this release, including the update on Flutter’s support for macOS and Linux, significant performance improvements, mobile and web updates — and much more!
Ready for production on all desktop platforms
Linux and macOS have reached stable and include the following features:
Cascading menus and support for the macOS system menu bar
You can now create platform-rendered menu bars on macOS using the PlatformMenuBar widget, which supports the insertion of platform-only menus, and control over what appears in the macOS application menus.
Full support for international text input on all desktop platforms
International text input, including for languages that make use of text input method editors (IMEs) such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean is fully-supported on all three desktop platforms, including third-party input methods such as Sogou and Google Japanese Input.
Accessibility on all desktop platforms
Flutter for Windows, macOS, and Linux supports accessibility services such as screen-readers, accessible navigation, and inverted colors.
Universal binaries by default on macOS
As of Flutter 3, Flutter macOS desktop apps are built as universal binaries, with native support for both existing Intel-based Macs and Apple’s latest Apple Silicon devices.
Deprecating Windows 7/8 for development
With this release, it has raised the recommended Windows version for development to Windows 10. While there isn’t any blocking development on older versions (Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1), these versions are no longer supported by Microsoft and there is limited testing on these releases.
Mobile updates
Updates to mobile platforms include the following:
Foldable phone support
The Flutter 3 release supports foldable mobile devices. In a collaboration spearheaded by Microsoft, new features and widgets allow you to create dynamic and delightful experiences on foldable devices.
As part of this work, MediaQuery now contains a list of DisplayFeatures, describing the bounds and states of device elements like hinges, folds, and cutouts. Additionally, the DisplayFeatureSubScreen widget now positions its child widget without overlapping the bounds of DisplayFeatures, and has already been integrated with the framework’s default dialogs and pop-ups, making Flutter aware and responsive to these elements out of the box.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
iOS variable refresh rate support
Flutter now supports variable refresh rate on iOS devices with ProMotion displays, including iPhone 13 Pro and iPad Pro. On these devices, Flutter apps can render at refresh rates reaching 120 hz, which were previously limited to 60 hz. This results in a smoother experience during fast animations such as scrolling. See flutter.dev/go/variable-refresh-rate for more details.
Gradle version update
If you create a new project with the Flutter tool, you might notice that the generated files now use the latest versions of the Gradle and Android Gradle plugins. For existing projects, you need to manually bump the versions to 7.4 for Gradle, and 7.1.2 for the Android Gradle plugin.
Web updates
Updates for web apps include the following:
Image decoding
Flutter web now automatically detects and uses the ImageDecoder API in browsers that support it. As of today, most Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera, Samsung Browser, and more) have added this API.
The new API decodes images asynchronously off the main thread using the browser’s built-in image codecs. This speeds up image decoding by 2x, and it never blocks the main thread, removing all jank that was previously caused by images.
Web app lifecycles
The new lifecycle API for Flutter web apps gives you the flexibility to control the bootstrap process of your Flutter app from the hosting HTML page, and helps Lighthouse analyze the performance of your app. This applies to many use-cases, including the following frequently requested scenarios:
A splash screen.
A loading indicator.
A plain HTML interactive landing page displayed before the Flutter app.
Tooling updates
Updates to Flutter and Dart tooling include:
Updated lint package
Version 2.0 of the lint packages have been released:
Flutter: https://pub.dev/packages/flutter_lints/versions/2.0.0
Dart: https://pub.dev/packages/lints/versions/2.0.0
Apps generated in Flutter 3 with flutter create automatically enable the v2.0 sets of lints. Existing apps, packages, and plugins are encouraged to migrate to v2.0 to follow the latest and greatest best practices in the Flutter world, by running flutter pub upgrade –major-versions flutter_lints.
Most of the newly added lint warnings in v2 come with automated fixes. So, after upgrading to the latest package version in your app’s pubspec.yaml file, you can run dart fix —-apply over your code base to fix most lint warnings automatically (some warnings still require some manual work). Apps, packages, or plugins that aren’t using package:flutter_lints yet can migrate by following the migration guide.
Performance improvements
Thanks to open source contributor knopp, partial repaint has been enabled on Android devices that support it. In our local testing this change cut average, 90th percentile, and 99th percentile frame rasterization times on the backdrop_filter_perf benchmark on a Pixel 4 XL device by 5x. Partial repaint when there is a single rectangular dirty region is now enabled on both iOS and newer Android devices.
It has further improved the performance of opacity animations in simple cases. In particular, when an Opacity widget contains only a single rendering primitive, the saveLayer method that is usually invoked by Opacity is omitted. In a benchmark constructed to measure the benefits of this optimization, rasterization time for this case improved by an order of magnitude.
More exciting updates
Other updates to the Flutter ecosystem include the following:
Material 3
Flutter 3 supports Material Design 3, the next generation of Material Design. Flutter 3 provides opt-in support for Material 3; this includes Material You features like dynamic color, an updated color system and typography, updates to many components, and new visual effects introduced in Android 12 like a new touch ripple design and a stretch overscroll effect. Try the Material 3 features in the new Take your Flutter app from Boring to Beautiful codelab.
For more information and to develop mobile apps using Flutter, Hire Flutter Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”.
To develop Mobile Apps using Flutter, please visit our technology page.
Content Source:
- medium.com
What’s new in Flutter 2.10
We can’t believe it’s time again for a Flutter 2.10 stable release!
There are several exciting things to announce as part of this release, including a big update on Flutter’s support for Windows, several significant performance improvements, new support for icons and colors in the framework, and some tooling improvements. In addition, we’ve got some updates on the removal of the dev channel, reduction in support for older versions of iOS, and a short list of breaking changes. Let’s get to it!
Ready for production apps on Windows
First and foremost, the Flutter 2.10 release brings with it the stable release of Windows support. You no longer need to flip a flag to get the functionality that produces Windows apps on the stable channel of Flutter — now it’s available by default!
Of course, we did a lot more than just flip a flag. This release includes extensive improvements for text handling, keyboard handling, and keyboard shortcuts, as well as new integrations directly into Windows, with support for command-line arguments, globalized text entry, and accessibility.
For much more on the Windows stable launch, see the Announcing Flutter for Windows blog post, which describes the architecture of Flutter on Windows that allows for deep integration and gives you a sense of just how many Flutter packages and plugins already support Windows. You can also see some examples of what our tooling and app partners are doing with Flutter on Windows!
Performance improvements
This release of Flutter includes initial support for dirty region management provided by Flutter community member knopp. He’s enabled partial repaints for a single dirty region on iOS/Metal. This change reduced 90th and 99th percentile rasterization times on a few benchmarks by an order of magnitude, and reduced GPU utilization on these benchmarks from more than 90% to less than 10%.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
We expect to bring the benefits of partial repaints to other platforms in future releases.
In the Flutter 2.8 release, we landed our own internal picture recording format. Now in Flutter 2.10, we’ve started building optimizations with it. As an example, one common case of opacity layers is now implemented much more efficiently. Even in the worst case, frame raster times in our benchmarks fell to under a third of their previous value.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
We expect this optimization to expand to cover more cases as we continue developing the picture recording format.
In profile and release modes, Dart code is compiled ahead of time to native machine code. The key to the efficiency and small size of this code is a whole program type flow analysis that unlocks many compiler optimizations and aggressive tree-shaking. However, as the type flow analysis must cover the whole program, it can be somewhat expensive. This release includes a faster implementation of type flow analysis. Overall build time for the Flutter app in our benchmarks fell by ~10%.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
As always, performance enhancements, reduced memory usage, and reduced latency are a priority for the Flutter team. Look forward to further improvements in future releases.
iOS updates
In addition to performance improvements, we’ve also added some platform-specific features and enhancements. One new enhancement is smoother keyboard animations in iOS from luckysmg, which is provided automatically to your app without you having to do a thing.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
We’ve also improved the stability of the camera plugin for iOS by fixing a few edge case crashes.
Finally, 64-bit iOS architectures get a new feature to reduce memory usage: compressed pointers.
A 64-bit architecture represents pointers as a 8-byte data structure. When you have a lot of objects, the space taken up by the pointers themselves adds to the overall memory usage of your app, especially if you have larger, more complicated apps that have more GC churn. However, your iOS app is very unlikely to have enough objects to require a significant portion of even the 32-bit address space (2 billion objects), let alone the enormity of the 64-bit address space (9 million billion objects).
Compressed pointers were provided in Dart 2.15 and in this release of Flutter, we use them to reduce the memory usage for 64-bit iOS apps. You can check out the Dart 2.15 blog post for details.
And while you’re reading Dart blog posts, don’t forget to check out the Dart 2.16 announcement for updates on supporting Flutter for Windows with package platform tagging and a new search experience on pub.dev.
Android updates
This release contains a number of improvements for Android as well. By default, when you create a new app, Flutter defaults to support the latest version of Android, version 12 (API level 31). Also, in this release, we’ve enabled multidex support automatically. If your app supports Android SDK versions below 21, and it exceeds the 64K method limit, simply pass the –multidex flag to flutter build appbundle or flutter build apk and your app will support multidex.
And last but not least, we listened to your feedback that Gradle error messages can be intimidating. For this reason, the Flutter tool now suggests resolution steps to common issues. For example, if you add a plugin to your app that requires you to increase the minimum supported Android SDK version, you now see a “Flutter Fix” suggestion in the logs.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
We continue to add more suggestions to common error messages, and would love to get your feedback on other error messages where this treatment would be useful.
Web updates
This release contains some improvements on the web as well. For example, in previous releases, when scrolling to the edge of a multiline TextField on the web, it wouldn’t scroll properly. This release introduces edge scrolling for text selection: when the selection moves outside of the text field, the field scrolls to view the scroll extent. This new behavior is available for both web and desktop apps.
Pic courtesy: medium.com
In addition, this release of Flutter includes another notable improvement in the web. We’re always looking to reduce the overhead of our mapping of Flutter to the web. In previous versions, every time we wanted to bring a native HTML widget into your Flutter app, we needed an overlay as part of our platform view support for the web. Each one of these overlays enables custom painting but represents a certain amount of overhead. If you have a large number of native HTML widgets in your app, such as links, that adds up to a lot of overhead. With this release, we’ve created a new “non-painting platform view” for the web that essentially removes that overhead. And we’ve taken advantage of this optimization in the Link widget, which means if you have many links in your Flutter web app, they no longer represent any significant overhead at all. We’ll be applying this optimization to other widgets over time.
For more information and to develop mobile apps using Flutter, Hire Flutter Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”.
To develop Mobile Apps using Flutter, please visit our technology page.
Content Source:
- medium.com
Web support for Flutter
In addition to mobile apps, Flutter supports the generation of web content rendered using standards-based web technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. With web support, you can compile existing Flutter code written in Dart into a client experience that can be embedded in the browser and deployed to any web server. You can use all the features of Flutter, and you don’t need a browser plug-in.
pic courtesy : flutter.dev
Adding web support to Flutter involved implementing Flutter’s core drawing layer on top of standard browser APIs, in addition to compiling Dart to JavaScript, instead of the ARM machine code that is used for mobile applications. Using a combination of DOM, Canvas, and CSS, Flutter can provide a portable, high-quality, and performant user experience across modern browsers. We implemented the core drawing layer completely in Dart and used Dart’s optimized JavaScript compiler to compile the Flutter core and framework along with your application into a single, minified source file that can be deployed to any web server.
While traditional web approaches remain a great choice, we envision the web support available in Flutter being valuable in many scenarios. For example:
A connected Progressive Web Application built with Flutter
Web support for Flutter enables existing mobile-based applications to be packaged as a PWA for reach to a broader variety of devices, or to provide a companion web experience to an existing app.
Embedded interactive content
Flutter provides a powerful environment for creating rich, data-centric components that can be easily hosted within an existing web page. Whether for data visualization, an online tool like a car configurator, or an embedded chart, Flutter can provide a productive development approach for embedded web content.
Embedding dynamic content in a Flutter mobile app
An established way to provide dynamic content updates within an existing mobile application is the use of a web view control, which can load and display information dynamically. The support Flutter now offers for a unified environment for web and mobile content enables you to deploy content online or embedded in an app without rewriting.
Not every HTML scenario is ideally suited for Flutter at this time. For example, text-rich flow-based content such as blog articles benefit from the document-centric model that the web is built around, rather than the app-centric services that a UI framework like Flutter can deliver. However, you can use Flutter to embed interactive experiences into these websites.
Building a web application with Flutter
Requirements
To create a Flutter app with web support, you need the following software:
- Flutter SDK. See the Flutter SDK installation instructions.
- Chrome; debugging a web app requires the Chrome browser.
- Optional: An IDE that supports Flutter. You can install Android Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, or Visual Studio Code and install the Flutter and Dart plugins to enable language support and tools for refactoring, running, debugging, and reloading your web app within an editor. See setting up an editor for more details.
Create a new project with web support
You can use the following steps to create a new project with web support.
Set up
Run the following commands to use the latest version of the Flutter SDK from the beta channel and enable web support:
flutter channel beta flutter upgrade flutter config --enable-web
Note: The flutter upgrade command silently fails when origin points to a personal fork. To validate that origin points to https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git, run the following commands in the root directory of your local copy of the https://github.com/flutter/flutter repository: cd <inside local copy of the flutter/flutter repo> git remote get-url origin https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git
Once web is enabled, the flutter devices command outputs a Chrome device that opens the Chrome browser with your app running, and a Web Server that provides the URL serving the app.
flutter devices 2 connected device: Web Server • web-server • web-javascript • Flutter Tools Chrome • chrome • web-javascript • Google Chrome 81.0.4044.129
After enabling web support, restart your IDE. You should now see Chrome (web) and Web Server (web) in the device pulldown.
Note: You only need to execute flutter config –enable-web once. You can always check the status of your configuration using the no-argument flutter config command.
Create and run
Creating a new project with web support is no different than creating a new Flutter project for other platforms.
Once you’ve configured your environment for web support, you can create and run a web app either in the IDE or from the command line.
IDE
After you’ve configured your environment to support the web, make sure you restart the IDE if it was already running.
Create a new app in your IDE and it automatically creates iOS, Android, and web versions of your app. (And macOS, too, if you’ve enabled desktop support.) From the device pulldown, select Chrome (web) and run your app to see it launch in Chrome.
Command line
To create a new app that includes web support (in addition to mobile support), run the following commands, substituting myapp with the name of your project:
flutter create myapp cd myapp
To serve your app from localhost in Chrome, enter the following from the top of the package:
flutter run -d chrome
Note: If there aren’t any other connected devices, the -d chrome is optional.
The flutter run command launches the application using the development compiler in a Chrome browser.
Build
Run the following command to generate a release build:
flutter build web
A release build uses dart2js (instead of the development compiler) to produce a single JavaScript file main.dart.js. You can create a release build using release mode (flutter run –release) or by using flutter build web. This populates a build/web directory with built files, including an assets directory, which need to be served together.
For more information, see Build and release a web app.
Add web support to an existing app
To add web support to an existing project, run the following command in a terminal from the root project directory:
flutter create .
For more information and to develop mobile apps using Flutter, Hire Flutter Developer from us as we give you a high-quality product by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft”. To develop Mobile Apps using Flutter, please visit our technology page.
Content Source:
- flutter.dev
Flutter: a Portable UI Framework for Mobile, Web, Embedded, and Desktop
Recently marks an important milestone for the Flutter framework, as we expand our focus from mobile to incorporate a broader set of devices and form factors. At I/O, we’re releasing our first technical preview of Flutter for web, announcing that Flutter is powering Google’s smart display platform including the Google Home Hub, and delivering our first steps towards supporting desktop-class apps with Chrome OS.
From Mobile to Multi-Platform
For a long time, the Flutter team mission has been to build the best framework for developing mobile apps for iOS and Android. We believe that mobile development is ripe for improvement, with developers today forced to choose between building the same app twice for two platforms, or making compromises to use cross-platform frameworks. Flutter hits the sweet spot of enabling a single codebase to deliver beautiful, fast, tailored experiences with high developer productivity for both platforms, and we’ve been excited to see how our early efforts have flourished into one of the most popular open source projects.
The results of this project were startling, thanks in large part to the rapid progress in web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, which have pervasively delivered hardware-accelerated graphics, animation, and text as well as fast JavaScript execution.
In parallel, the core Flutter project has been making progress to enable desktop-class apps, with input paradigms such as keyboard and mouse, window resizing, and tooling for Chrome OS app development. The exploratory work that we did for embedding Flutter into desktop-class apps running on Windows, Mac and Linux has also graduated into the core Flutter engine.
A Portable UI Framework for All Screens
It’s worth pausing for a moment to acknowledge the business potential of a high-performance, portable UI framework that can deliver beautiful, tailored experiences to such a broad variety of form factors from a single codebase.
For startups, the ability to reach users on mobile, web, or desktop through the same app lets them reach their full audience from day one, rather than having limits due to technical considerations. Especially for larger organizations, the ability to deliver the same experience to all users with one codebase reduces complexity and development cost, and lets them focus on improving the quality of that experience.
With support for mobile, desktop, and web apps, our mission expands: we want to build the best framework for developing beautiful experiences for any screen.
Flutter for Web
Flutter team is releasing the first technical preview of Flutter for the web. While this technology is still in development, we are ready for early adopters to try it out and give us feedback. Our initial vision for Flutter on the web is not as a general purpose replacement for the document experiences that HTML is optimized for; instead, we intend it as a great way to build highly interactive, graphically rich content, where the benefits of a sophisticated UI framework are keenly felt.
To showcase Flutter for the web, we worked with the New York Times to build a demo. In addition to world-class news coverage, the New York Times is famous for its crossword and other puzzle games. At Google I/O this week, you can get a sneak peek of their newly refreshed KENKEN puzzle game, which runs with the same code on Android, iOS, web, Mac, and Chrome OS.
Flutter for Mobile Devices
With the immediate availability of Flutter 1.5 in our stable channel. Flutter 1.5 includes hundreds of changes in response to developer feedback, including updates for new App Store iOS SDK requirements, updates to the iOS and Material widgets, engine support for new device types, and Dart 2.3 featuring new UI-as-code language features.
As the framework itself matures, we’re investing in building out the supporting ecosystem. The architectural model of Flutter has always prioritized a small core framework, supplemented by a rich package community. In the last few months, Google has contributed production-quality packages for web views, Google Maps, and Firebase ML Vision, and this week, we’re adding initial support for in-app payments. And with over 2,000 open source packages available for Flutter, there are options available for most scenarios.
Flutter continues to grow in popularity and adoption. A growing roster of demanding customers including eBay, Sonos, Square, Capital One, Alibaba and Tencent are developing apps with Flutter. And they’re having fun!
Flutter for Desktop
Flutter is also being used on the desktop. For some months, we’ve been working on the desktop as an experimental project. But now we’re graduating this into Flutter engine, integrating this work directly into the mainline repo. While these targets are not production-ready yet, we have published early instructions for developing Flutter apps to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Another quickly growing Flutter platform is Chrome OS, with millions of Chromebooks being sold every year, particularly in education. Chrome OS is a perfect environment for Flutter, both for running Flutter apps and as a developer platform, since it supports execution of both Android and Linux apps. With Chrome OS, you can use Visual Studio Code or Android Studio to develop a Flutter app that you can test and run locally on the same device without an emulator. You can also publish Flutter apps for Chrome OS to the Play Store, where millions of others can benefit from your creation.
Flutter for Embedded Devices
As the final example of Flutter’s portability, we offer Flutter embedded on other devices. We recently published samples that demonstrate Flutter running directly on smaller-scale devices like Raspberry Pi, and we offer an embedding API for Flutter that allows it to be used in scenarios including home, automotive and beyond.
Perhaps one of the most pervasive embedded platforms where Flutter is already running is on the smart display operating system that powers the likes of Google Home Hub.
Within Google, some Google-built features for the Smart Display platform are powered by Flutter today. And the Assistant team is excited to continue to expand the portfolio of features built with Flutter for the Smart Display in the coming months; the goal this year is to use Flutter to drive the overall system UI.
For more Information and to build mobile apps using Flutter, Hire Flutter Developer from us as we provide you high-quality services by utilizing all the latest tools and advanced technology. E-mail us any clock at – hello@hkinfosoft.com or Skype us: “hkinfosoft“.
To develop Mobile Apps using Flutter, please visit our technology page.
