Skip to main content

Flutter

First of all, let's introduce you to flutter because most of the people around, keep wondering what is the main difference between Flutter and Dart, so if you have this confusion I would definitely say that you have come to the right place. If you have any doubts regarding whether to start app development using Flutter or not you are at the right place. So without giving your eyes extra pain let's start.

Introduction-:

Let's start with the keypoint i.e. "Flutter vs Dart", so in short Flutter is the Software Development Kit that is used for making the cross-platform apps and Dart is the programming language that is used to code these apps, in easier words Flutter is just like the tools which we use for the construction of the house and the material which we use can be somewhat compared to Dart.

Now coming to the real official definition of Flutter and Dart, So Flutter is Google's UI toolkit for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, desktop and embedded devices from a single codebase. Now Dart is a programming language designed for client development, such as for the web and mobile apps. It is developed by Google and can also be used to build server and desktop applications. Dart is an object-oriented, class-based, garbage-collected language with C-style syntax.

Well, now you must have the picture of Flutter and Dart. Now let's discuss the joy of working on Flutter with you so that you make the most benefit of the innovation. In this documentation, I highlight my thoughts on what advantages of Flutter are going to make it dominate cross-platform application development in the upcoming years.

Details-:

Pros of using Flutter-:

Cross-Platform support -: 

The biggest advantage of using Flutter for the purpose of app development is that you no longer need to know 3--4 languages for the purpose of setting up your app and web app. Since Flutter is cross-platform, therefore we can code a single code snippet according to the need and that is it, we can use the same code to run ios apps, android apps, and web apps also. In brief, sharing the UI and business logic, which is possible with Flutter, saves time, effort and the health of the developer while not affecting the performance of the end product

Code development time got reduced -: 

Flutter's "hot reload" feature, in turn, allows seeing the applied changes almost instantly, without even losing the current application state. And this is exactly what makes Flutter app development several times faster due to the increased development speed. Besides, the Flutter team has put lots of effort into providing a wide variety of ready-to-use widgets. Most of them are incredibly customizable, saving your time like no other framework before. In addition to numerous core layout widgets, Flutter provides a large set of Material and Cupertino widgets that perfectly mimic the behavior of each design language.

Libraries and Packages that Dart provides-: 

If someone needs to implement some extra features in the app then he/she does not want to waste his/her time writing the full code, again and again, there are thousands of packages that are available on https://pub.dev/ where you can search for the package you want to embed in your code. All we need to do is just a little research to find the appropriate package name and that can easily be done using StackOverflow and other informative resources.

Works easily on both Android Studio and VS Code-:

While most of us prefer coding on VS Code instead of any other compiler but most of the flutter engineers prefer Android Studio due to the next level features that it provides such as AVD Manager, Instant App Run, help to Build Up App using IntelliJ-code for All Devices and also helps to Connect with Firebase but apart from all of this Android Studio is a very heavy software which is ultimately going to heat up your device if it's not having enough RAM and SSDs so many of the developers face problems but there is no need to worry as setting up flutter on VS Code is also possible just using few extensions. (P.S.-: You can also refer to a youtube tutorial if you want to)

Documentation-:

Keeping the best part for the last, the biggest advantage of using flutter is its documentation. All of the flutter widgets used in the code are very well documented and you may find it very easily on its official website. Easy documentation helps you a lot to go through the errors and the use of any widget in a flutter.

Cons Of using Flutter-:

So now after so many advantages of flutter let's look at the other side of the coin, also all the cons listed below are according to me which obviously means that it depends on the user to user. But while using flutter I faced the following drawbacks-:

  • Small Community-: Although flutter is growing at a very fast pace still it has a smaller community in comparison to the community of other coding languages used for app development i.e. Java, Kotlin, Swift. So let's say if you have a doubt/error that is very much conceptual/uncommon there is a slight possibility that you may find it difficult to find the solution.

  • Developing Stage-: Although we can see this as an advantage that flutter is developing continuously but sometimes it feels annoying to work with flutter due to its regular updation. Let's assume you are working on a project and taking help from a tutorial so even if the tutorial is just six months old but it can easily happen that flutter got updated and now the widget is known by another name or maybe the widget shown in the video is deprecated (P.S. It happens only sometimes) all of this breaks the continuity of the project we are working on because we need to search what is the newly updated name by reading all of the documentation.

  • Clashing of dependencies-: We import packages in flutter through the passing of the installation command in pubspec.yaml file but it may happen sometimes that two different libraries may not be ready to share their latest versions together as one or the other hasn't been updated after it was coded by the authors. So we need to change the versions accordingly.

    Conclusion-: Time being it may doubt many of you that whether we should start with flutter or not but according to my recommendation with the time passing and the growth rates flutter is the future of app development as it is way crisper than all the other languages and easy to learn and also due to its continuous development.

    P.S. If you are very much interested in app development don't just remain limited to flutter, open up to kotlin, java and swift also because it will increase the possibility of you getting to know app development from depth.

So according to me at the end just hold your laptop and make a coffee and start coding for 45 days or so continuously on flutter and you will definitely learn to code flutter to the mark of what is really required to build basic to medium level applications.

Hope this documentation was able to give you a brief idea about what flutter is and why it is growing so fast and what are the expectations which we can have with flutter in the upcoming years and also the main point of whether we should start flutter or not.

So that is all that you need to get started with the Navigation Drawer with Navigation Component, if you have any doubts you can definetly visit the official documentation of Flutter.

HAPPY LEARNING 😎🙌

References-:

  • For preparing these documents official documentation of Flutter. was referred for maintaining the authenticity of the code.