Understanding Flutter Architecture: An Overview of Its Components and Features
Discover the four main components of the Flutter architecture, including the Flutter Engine, Foundation Library, Widgets, and Design Specific Widgets. Learn how the top-down layer approach and state management work in Flutter, and how gestures and layers contribute to building high-quality mobile apps using Flutter.
Flutter Architecture:
In this section, we will discuss the architecture of the Flutter framework, which mainly consists of four components:
- Flutter Engine
- Foundation Library
- Widgets
- Design Specific Widgets
1. Flutter Engine:
The Flutter Engine is a portable runtime for developing high-quality mobile apps primarily based on the C++ language. It implements Flutter core libraries that include animation and graphics, file and network I/O, plugin architecture, accessibility support, and a Dart runtime for developing, compiling, and running Flutter applications. It uses Google's open-source graphics library, Skia, to render low-level graphics.
2. Foundation Library:
The Foundation Library contains all the required packages for the basic building blocks of writing a Flutter application. These libraries are written in Dart language.
3. Widgets:
In Flutter, everything is a widget, which is the core concept of this framework. A widget in Flutter is a user interface component that affects and controls the view and interface of the app. It represents an immutable description of part of the user interface and includes graphics, text, shapes, and animations that are created using widgets. The widgets are similar to React components.
In Flutter, the application is itself a widget that contains many sub-widgets. This means that the app is the top-level widget, and its UI is built using one or more child widgets, which, in turn, can include sub-child widgets. This feature makes it easy to create a complex user interface.
4. Design Specific Widgets:
The Flutter framework has two sets of widgets that conform to specific design languages. These are:
- Material Design for Android applications - Material Design is a design language created by Google that is used for designing applications on Android platforms.
- The Material Design widget set in Flutter includes a range of widgets, such as AppBar, FloatingActionButton, BottomNavigationBar, Drawer, and more, that adhere to the Material Design guidelines. These widgets provide a consistent look and feel across Android applications built with Flutter.
- Cupertino Style for iOS applications - Cupertino is the design language used by Apple for iOS applications.
- The Cupertino widget set in Flutter includes a range of widgets, such as CupertinoNavigationBar, CupertinoButton, CupertinoPicker, and more, that adhere to the Cupertino style guidelines. These widgets provide a consistent look and feel across iOS applications built with Flutter.
- Cross-platform development: Flutter allows developers to build apps for both Android and iOS platforms using a single codebase, which saves time and effort.
- Hot reload: Flutter's hot reload feature allows developers to see the changes they make to the code in real-time, making the development process faster and more efficient.
- Widget-based architecture: Flutter uses a widget-based architecture, which makes it easy to build custom UI components and reuse them across the app.
- Fast development: Flutter's features, such as hot reload, widget-based architecture, and pre-built widgets, make the development process faster, allowing developers to deliver the app to market quickly.
- Great performance: Flutter uses its rendering engine, which provides excellent app performance, and allows developers to create smooth animations and transitions.
- Large developer community: Flutter has a large and active developer community that provides support, plugins, and packages to help developers build high-quality apps.
Comments
Post a Comment