One thing I have heard about software engineering is that this is a field that keeps changing, and in order to be able to keep abreast of the latest trend we need to keep learning. As someone who is most of the time risk-averse, I only felt the need to learn new technologies when I absolutely need to, and I felt hesitant to tinker around using unfamiliar features. But I have to admit that you won’t be able to learn the technology unless you really move out of your comfort zone. Last quarter I took CS492 – Mobile App Development class, and after the initial 2 weeks’ painstaking learning session, it became my favorite tool to implement my idea and build it into an app.
The few things I like about flutter:
1 The flexibility.
Depending on what you are implementing, there is an ocean of pub. dev packages for you to choose from. You can choose by their popularity and select the pub that best suits your need. There is also a large online community of developers discussing and developing new pub packages so that you can get the most up-to-date pub to be added to your YAML dependency file. It really makes the development faster and easier.
2. User-Friendly Design
When I use either VS code or Android Studio, and when I wanted to create a widget whether it is a stateful widget or a stateless widget. The platform has its pre-coded template that all you need to do is to type in “ stf” for a stateful widget or “stl” for a stateless widget. And whenever you want to wrap your scaffold into a container or wrap the container into the widget, right-click the section, and you can select your desired wrapper. I found it very convenient, and efficient that you don’t have to memorize the highly repeatable portion of the code.
Aside from the above features, flutter also has the hot reload button that is very convenient.
It is important for the developer to know what certain codes would make the screen look like, and the hot reload button allows developers to see the immediate result without taking the time to run the entire package. If there is any adjustment needed, it saves a tremendous amount of time adjusting.
3. Faster development
Flutter comes with a large number of ready-to-use widgets, most of which implement the material design concepts. Flutter is a dynamic and flexible platform compared to other application development frameworks. there is no need to write two different codes while developing iOS and Android applications. Flutter also uses the same UI for apps in different operating systems as Flutter has its UI and widget libraries. Less testing is required by the developer as both the apps are identical; checking one ensures that the other will be the same.
