Flutter satisfies every developer’s dream of developing a clutter-free, native mobile application. Developers find it exciting to build a fully-functional mobile application using Flutter. Flutter’s complete package available for developing a native application has been embraced by hundreds of thousands of developers globally. It has grabbed 139K stars & 21.5K forks on GitHub.
Flutter changes the game when it comes to pixel-perfect & smooth native applications. Flutter is flexible and easily integrates with your existing source code. The framework looks quite promising, which is why Alibaba became one of the early adopters of it.
A lot is written and said about the framework, but ever wondered why it is so popular? What is the x-factor that makes Flutter’s SDK different from others?
Well, in this blog, we will be covering the above answers. We would let you know how Flutter architecture is making all the difference; how Futter works? Why Dart is used for Flutter app development and more!
Introduction:
Flutter is an open-source, cross-platform UI development kit launched by Google. It uses Dart as a programming language, which minimizes a bridge’s need to execute the code. Dart uses an “ahead-of-time” compilation that helps in communicating with the respective platform eliminating the need for a JavaScript bridge. Dart quickly compiles the source code into native code and executes it instantly, thereby refining the app startup time.
Well, this is one of the few things that makes Flutter stand out from the rest of the SDKs.
Let’s elaborate on Flutter’s architecture in detail.
Flutter platform:
Flutter’s platform hosts a Dart virtual machine covered in a shell. The shell is accessible by naive application’s APIs and also sets up a platform-relevant canvas. Shells set up communication to execute the various courses of events.
Flutter engine:
The engine lies right about the Flutter platform layer. It encompasses Dart runtime, Skia, platform channel, etc. However, the engine is a subset of the platform-specific shell.
Flutter framework:
The first thing is where you interact with the Flutter framework. It is the most important section for any Flutter app development company. You can use the right theme, Cupertino or Android, to define the application’s look & feel.
The next important part of Flutter is,
Widgets
Widgets, aka the building blocks, control the view of the UI. It is the widget that plays an important role in deciding the application’s UI. However, widgets are extensible as well as customizable. It can be varied according to the application’s design. One interesting thing about Flutter widgets is that it doesn’t use any platform widgets; it has its own set of widgets. This drastically reduces the application’s complexity.
You can use an immutable UI model for generating widgets of your choice. You can choose how a widget will behave when you render it over the platform.
Let’s now talk about Flutter Framework Architecture:
Flutter is all about widgets, be it stateful or stateless. There are plenty of Flutter widgets available that can be customized to give a native-like feel to the application. Widgets make use of advanced animations and gesture recognition and render it to the Skia canvas.
Flutter engine hosts Skia and it is present in a platform-specific shell. The platform-specific APIs are controlled, operated, and executed by Skia.
The engine also hosts Dart language, which compiles the source code into native code, either Android’s NDK or iOS’s LLVM. This results in faster compilation and launch of the application. You can expect the speed to be 60fps making the application’s speed distinguishable.
Rendering pipeline:
The Flutter application’s UI is rendered on Skia canvas, which updates at a speed of 60fps, as mentioned above. It uses GPU for this task. This is the reason why Flutter operates so smoothly.
If you are wondering why Flutter uses Dart, then here is your answer.
Dart is again a Google-owned programming language that uses ahead-of-time compilation. It quickly transforms the source code into native code X86 or ARM, depending on the platform you choose.
Also, Dart 2 is an object-oriented and garbage-collected programming language facilitating sound-type systems and type inferencing. Garbage collection is speedy and doesn’t require memory locks.
It is single-threaded which means it creates a dedicated thread for the UI, GPU, and IO task runners.
Dart also extends excellent IDE support in Android Studio, Visual Studio Code, and IntelliJ.
It has one of the fastest-growing communities and also provides a pool of libraries and packages for app development.
The Dart programming language is easy to learn and implement. Even if you do not have any hands-on experience with the language, you can easily get going with it.
X-factor of Flutter:
Flutter is persuasive. If you ask any of your hired flutter app developers their favourite part with Flutter, you will get the hot reload feature as an answer. Flutter allows you to view the changes made to the source code instantly. This enables you to fix the errors quickly without disturbing any other view of the application. It makes the entire process of app development fast and flexible. This is one such feature that changes the game for Flutter.
Also, Flutter extends brilliant testing support for unit testing, widget testing, and integration tests. Unit testing is faster, and you can get away with writing test codes. The quality testing is extremely powerful and speedy with Flutter because you test the same source code for Android and iOS.
The CI/CD service is free of cost and can be set up in a few minutes. Additionally, Flutter also plans to make itself as useful as possible for website development.
Conclusion:
Flutter is an open-source SDK, and we would say nothing is impossible with Flutter. You can almost customize anything as per your requirement. So, yes, that covers it all, how the Flutter framework works, what is Flutter framework architecture, and how it distinguishes itself from the other available open-source frameworks.
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