m3sv / Flutter For Android Developers
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⚠️ [Deprecated] I no longer use, nor interested in Flutter. If you're looking for an up-to-date resource on Flutter goodies then check awesome-flutter. Cheers.
Flutter for Android developers
The tutorial assumes that you are at least familiar with Android development and know what scary words like View, ViewGroup, Java, Kotlin mean.
Table of contents
- Overview of Flutter
- Installing Flutter
- Working with an editor
- Learning Dart
- Flutter introductory resources
- Architecture and state management
- Dependency Injection
- Navigation & routing
- Network requests and Serialization
- Persistence
- Reactive/Rx
- Android functionality and corresponding plugins
- Activity/Fragment?
- Lifecycle?
- Orientation change?
- Declarative vs Imperative
- Android views and their corresponding Flutter widgets
- Hint on an EditText
- Custom Views/Canvas drawing
- Gesture and click listeners
- Glide/Picasso/Fresco(Image loading)?
- Animations
- Resource management
- Theming
- Gradle
- Plugins/Libraries
- Local notifications
- Firebase
- Communicating with native platform
- NDK
- Background processing
- Testing and profiling
- Flavors and deployment
- Samples and tutorials
- Community
Overview of Flutter
Installing Flutter
Tools/IDE
Working with an editor
Learning Dart
Flutter introductory resources
- Official Flutter docs
- Flutter for Android developers introductory
- Google Codelab
- Tensor Programming excellent programming videos, regularly posts Flutter tutorials
Architecture and state management
- Official documentation about state management.
- Flutter architecture samples(GitHub)
- BLoC
- BLoC/Rx
- Redux
- scoped_model
- MobX
Dependency injection
Navigation & routing
Flutter uses Navigator for navigation.
Handling incoming intents
Handling intents from external applications
Network requests and Serialization
No, there's no Retrofit or Gson/Moshi in Flutter.
Persistence
- Shared Preferences
- To interact with SQLite you use sqflite plugin
Reactive/Rx
Dart is a reactive language out of the box, you can either use Dart's Streams or RxDart if you're familiar with ReactiveX.
Android functionality and corresponding plugins
Activity/Fragment?
Both activities and fragments are represented as a Widget in Flutter.
Read more: What are the equivalent of activities and fragments in Flutter?
Lifecycle?
How do I listen to Android activity lifecycle events?
Orientation change?
How do I handle landscape transitions in Flutter?
Declarative vs Imperative
In the imperative style, you would typically go to ViewB’s owner and retrieve the instance b using selectors or with findViewById or similar, and invoke mutations on it (and implicitly invalidate it). For example:
// Imperative style
b.setColor(red)
b.clearChildren()
ViewC c3 = new ViewC(...)
b.add(c3)
In the declarative style, view configurations (such as Flutter’s Widgets) are immutable and are only lightweight “blueprints”. To change the UI, a Widget triggers a rebuild on itself (most commonly by calling setState() on StatefulWidgets in Flutter) and constructs a new Widget subtree.
// Declarative style
return ViewB(
color: red,
child: ViewC(...),
)
Why Flutter uses declarative UI
Android views and their corresponding Flutter widgets
Flutter contains much more widgets than Android SDK, you can discover them here and in Widget index.
The most common Android views and their corresponding Flutter widgets are here:
Hint on an EditText
To add a hint to an EditText(TextField) you add InputDecoration to it:
body: Center(
child: TextField(
decoration: InputDecoration(hintText: "This is a hint"),
)
)
Custom Views/Canvas drawing
Flutter has similar to Android Canvas API.
To create custom widgets you compose smaller widgets.
Gesture and click listeners
Glide/Picasso/Fresco(Image loading)?
Flutter is able to load images from URL out of the box, all you have to do is use the Image.network constructor, like this:
Image.network(
'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/flutter/website/master/src/_includes/code/layout/lakes/images/lake.jpg',
)
It also supports gifs!
Unfortunately, Image.network does not support placeholders and/or caching. To achieve those, please see the following recipes:
Animations
Resource management
Theming
Gradle
Flutter uses Dart's own build system, and the Pub package manager. You can read more about here.
Plugins/Libraries
Packages allow you to use Flutter packages or access underlying platform features in a form of a library.
- Dart pub(like Jcenter in Java world)
- Official Flutter plugins from Flutter repo
Local notifications
For local notifications you would have to rely on a 3rd party plugin.
Firebase
To Log in with Facebook, use flutter_facebook_login plugin.
Communicating with native platform
NDK
How do I use the NDK in my Flutter application?
Background processing
- Offloading tasks to a background thread
- Background processes
- Executing Dart in the Background with Flutter Plugins and Geofencing
Testing and profiling, DevTools
Flavors and deployment
- Creating flavors of a Flutter app (Flutter & Android setup)
- Flavoring Flutter
- Preparing for release
- Fastlane continuous delivery
- App bundle
Samples and tutorials
- Flutter samples on Github
- Cookbook
- Codelabs
- Tutorials
- Flutter on Medium
- Trending on Github
- History of Everything application
- Awesome Flutter
- Flutter Notebook
- Flutter Go