Google has launched its portable UI
Toolkit Flutter 1.0 during its Flutter Live conference in London.
Flutter 1.0 is a mobile
app
development
platform allowing its user to write apps that share a single
code base across iOS and Android with a Native User Interface.
During the launch, many compared Flutter
to React Native by Facebook. React Native relies on JavaScript while
Flutter relies on Dart, Google’s in-house programming language, to
avoid the need for JavaScript bridge to initiate interactions with
the native services by the OS platform. Dart is easy to write codes
in and therefore comes with a shorter learning curve compared to
JavaScript.
According to a Google post, Flutter
enables the “ultimate realization” of Material Design, Google’s
own design language for Android, to create a foundation for user
interfaces; thus “enables users to build beautiful apps.” The
platform is powered by hardware-accelerated Skia 2D that allows
lightning speed transitions.
Flutter is free and an open
source solutions
with a BSD-style license, and includes the contributions of hundreds
of developers from around the world. It also develops a new
capability for developers and designers to iterate on their apps in
real time.
Flutter 1.0 is the first stable release
of the platform. The new version focused on stabilization and bug
fixes. It also added new features such as Dart 2.1, Add to App, and
Platform Views.
Dart 2.1 is an update to Dart which
provides smaller code sizes, faster type checks, and better usability
for type errors. According to an announcement by Google, Dart 2.1
version reduced minified output size by 17% and improved compilation
time by 15%.
Add to App is a feature that will let
users add Flutter easily to an existing app. Currently, the feature
is in preview since the APIs and tooling are still in development.
Platform Views enables the inclusion of
an Android or iPhone platform control in a Flutter app. For this to
work, Google developed two platform view widgets, Android-view and
UiKitView. Android support is still in preview and will soon support
iOS as well.
Flutter can be used for both UI and
back-end instead of using one technology stack for UI and one stack
for business logic. It is also aimed to reduce a lot of code as there
are customization and pre-defined libraries available in the Flutter
SDK.
Google also announced Hummingbird, a
web-based implementation of the Flutter runtime which enables Flutter
code to run on the standards-based web without change.
Charter
Global has the experience in developing mobile
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in multiple platforms. We have expert developers for Android,
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