What is Flutter? Explanation for non-developers
In this article, I’m describing Flutter and the benefits of this cross-platform development framework for non-developers. What the Flutter is and why your team should definitely try it. Only the basic principles and concepts of the framework. I’m not going to dive deep into technical details and the framework architecture and stuff like that. For such kind of technical info, I will write a new article.
In a previous article, I described why I switched to Flutter after Android development and cross-platform React Native experience.
Flutter basic principles and concepts
Flutter is an open-source framework for developing cross-platform applications. That means that from the same code developers can build applications for Android, iOS, Web, and now event desktop platforms like MacintoshOS, Windows, and Linux.
In 2015 Google introduced the first, initial version of flutter and in 2018 launched the first stable version of the framework. Google is developing a lot of different tools for developers, but Flutter is one of the most successful products, and what is really important is that flutter is completely free to use, it’s an open-source product.
The source code is published on Github, so anyone can see all the changes, updates, or even contribute to the flutter codebase. Flutter is one of the most popular repositories on Github with a very active community: a lot of pull requests, issues, suggestions, and improvements.
But how flutter gained popularity that fast? I can highlight 3 of the most important reasons:
- Fast Development
- Great Performance
- Low-cost development
Fast Development with Flutter
Flutter has hot-reload technology. And this helps developers to quickly and easily implement new features, build complex UIs, and test it in seconds. Hot-reload allows developers to make some changes in code, for example, change the word of some text label, then these updates automatically deployed to the running app and Flutter just repaints everything on the screen. That takes up to a few seconds.
Another thing that allows developers to build applications really fast is the rich set of fully-customizable widgets based on Material Design and Cupertino designs.
The code quality of these widgets is great, they are extremely customizable and most importantly they save development time. So, developers can leverage the preset widgets or build custom designs based on the existent implementation.
For example, the developer implemented this simple app using Material Design Widgets. The best thing is that if we build this app for iOS, the app will look exactly the same with all the animations, effects, and notifications. This is the benefit of flutter. So, in no time developers can implement design and it will look exactly the same on different platforms.
In addition to this, developers can build their own custom widgets based on the basic Flutter widgets, not necessarily on Material or Cupertino implementation. Beautiful custom designs will be exactly the same on different platforms.
Performance of Flutter apps
Flutter doesn’t require any additional bridges to work on different devices and it’s not like other WebView based frameworks. Flutter has its own technology to compile codebase directly to machine code. Flutter’s widgets incorporate all critical platform differences such as scrolling, navigation, icons, and other platform-dependent things. So, the Flexible compiler technology lets us run Dart code in different ways, depending on your target platform.
Flutter uses one compiler for targeting mobile devices, desktop, or server. And for Web, it uses a different compiler. This approach for compiling to native machine code allows flutter apps to run as performant as it possibly could. This is a huge plus.
Low-cost development of flutter apps
As you already know, flutter helps developers to quickly and easily implement UI, it has great performance and it uses a single codebase for building Android, iPhone apps, and now even Web and desktop apps. These things altogether drastically reduce the time needed to build apps and test them on different platforms. This means that it costs much much less in terms of money and time to test an idea, create an MVP, or a complete app for different platforms.
So, basically, Flutter becomes one of the most popular, most powerful, and efficient frameworks for developing apps. The community of developers is growing fast and now all the indications are that the Flutter is the future of cross-platform development.
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