Use Widget State - Your First Flutter App - raywenderlich.com

Learn more about the important Stateless and Stateful Widgets, which help keep your UI performant and in-sync with the state of your app data.

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Both total beginners and native iOS and Android developers — no Flutter, Dart, or previous developer knowledge required! This course walks you through building an app from start to finish.

If you're already an experienced iOS or Android developer, but have zero knowledge of Flutter and Dart, this course will get you up to speed fast.

You'll start by learning the basics of Flutter, an increasingly popular way for mobile developers to build apps that target both iOS and Android, and even desktop and web. Then, you’ll master Flutter fundamentals like widgets, variables, and app state. You’ll even learn how to fix bugs! You’ll get a primer on coding basics to level-up your app-development skills. You’ll add more cool functionality to your app and practice your new coding skills.

Finally, you’ll amp up the flair by learning how to style your app!

This course is the first course in our Flutter Beginner Learning Path. While the course will cover Dart concepts as needed, you may also want to check out the second course in the learning path, Programming with Dart, to supplement your work in this course.

If you're an intermediate or advanced developer that is brand new to Flutter, you can zoom through this course at 2X speed and build the sample app. Then you'll be ready to dive even deeper into Flutter!

About Flutter:

Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit created by Google. It is used to develop applications for Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows, Google Fuchsia, and the web from a single codebase.

The first version of Flutter was known as codename "Sky" and ran on the Android operating system. It was unveiled at the 2015 Dart developer summit, with the stated intent of being able to render consistently at 120 frames per second. During the keynote of Google Developer Days in Shanghai, Google announced Flutter Release Preview 2, which is the last big release before Flutter 1.0. On December 4, 2018, Flutter 1.0 was released at the Flutter Live event, denoting the first "stable" version of the Framework. On December 11, 2019, Flutter 1.12 was released at the Flutter Interactive event.

On May 6, 2020, the Dart SDK in version 2.8 and the Flutter in version 1.17.0 were released, where support was added to the Metal API, improving performance on iOS devices (approximately 50%), new Material widgets, and new network tracking.

Dart platform

Flutter apps are written in the Dart language and make use of many of the language's more advanced features.

On Windows, macOS, and Linux Flutter runs in the Dart virtual machine, which features a just-in-time execution engine. While writing and debugging an app, Flutter uses Just In Time compilation, allowing for "hot reload", with which modifications to source files can be injected into a running application. Flutter extends this with support for stateful hot reload, where in most cases changes to source code are reflected immediately in the running app without requiring a restart or any loss of state.

Release versions of Flutter apps are compiled with ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation on both Android and iOS, making Flutter's high performance on mobile devices possible.

Flutter engine

Flutter's engine, written primarily in C++, provides low-level rendering support using Google's Skia graphics library. Additionally, it interfaces with platform-specific SDKs such as those provided by Android and iOS. The Flutter Engine is a portable runtime for hosting Flutter applications. It implements Flutter's core libraries, including animation and graphics, file and network I/O, accessibility support, plugin architecture, and a Dart runtime and compile toolchain. Most developers interact with Flutter via the Flutter Framework, which provides a reactive framework and a set of platform, layout, and foundation widgets.