Flutter: Why you should consider to move to it
Flutter. Speed and Potential
Flutter (programming language — Dart) is a platform that has already attracted the attention of large companies that have used it to launch their applications. This platform is interesting for its simplicity compared to web application development and the speed of native application development. Flutter is a platform for building mobile applications from Google. It is cross-platform and allows you to compile a created project under 3 operating systems: • Android • iOS • Fuchsia Fuchsia is a real-time operating system (OSRC) developed by Google. Why is this important? Google plans to launch smart speakers and laptops based on the new OS in the coming years. This gives us an understanding that by the end of 2020, Fuchsia could take an equal place alongside iOS and Android. Google is actively promoting Flutter, gradually gaining popularity, and is likely to continue to squeeze out other tools that currently use cross-platform development (React Native, Xamarin), especially with the widespread use of Fuchsia. Given that Google positions this operating system as a replacement for Android, sooner or later Flutter will supersede native development for Android. This means that, on the way out, for example, if the mobile application is written using Flutter, in a few years it will not have to be copied from scratch in order for it to work on Fuchsia. And it will save your budget! Therefore, this potential and active development supported and promoted by Google are the main advantages of Flutter. Other pros are as follows: — Custom graphics engine (no need to do the interface separately for Android and iOS); — The interface is created using code, which makes the line between logic and design much thinner; — The interface is easily broken down into individual modules.
Some insights:
Flutter does not use JavaScript. Dart is compiled into binary code, which achieves a rate comparable to Objective-C, Swift, Java, or Kotlin. It does not use native components, again, in no form, so you do not have to write any layers to communicate with them. Instead, like game engines (and you know that games have a very dynamic UI), it sketches the entire interface on its own. Buttons, text, media elements, backgrounds are all drawn inside the Flutter graphics engine. Therefore, it’s worth noting that the Hello World application on Flutter takes up very little space: iOS ≈ 2.5Mb and Android ≈ 4M; To build a UI for Flutter, you need to use a declarative approach, inspired by the ReactJS web framework, which is based on widgets (in the world of Internet-named components). For even more gains in the speed of the interface, widgets are redrawn as needed — only when something has changed; Last but not least, Hot-Reload is built into the framework. It is so native to the web, however, has not yet been applied to native platforms.
How does it work?
In Dart programming language, a mobile application is created with a description of the GUI and all logic. The result of the work is added to the native application, as are images, fonts, etc. And, of course, this process is automated. At the same time, a single screen is created in the native part of the program, where the virtual machine Dart is loaded, which executes Flutter.
Taras Orevchuk (CIO, HebronSoft):
“To me, as an engineer, Flutter means speed. First of all, it’s the speed in development, because there is Hot-Reload support that allows you to change the code and see these changes in the emulator in less than a second without losing state programs. Flutter doesn’t use the JavaScript bridge so the app’s speed is higher. Flutter comes with UI rendering components, a lot of libraries, device API access, navigation, and testing that eliminates the need to use third-party integrations. I like to work with Flutter because there is an opportunity to make applications for desktops. Now there is a very large set of widgets, therefore apps are built very quickly.” This technology has caught the wave of success and hype. Flutter has successful community development and exciting approaches at its core. In our opinion, this is the key to the long-term and successful existence of this framework.
