Building a performant cross-platform mobile UI with Flutter

Description

Flutter is a new open source SDK from Google that allows developers to build highly performant and customizable native Android and iOS apps from a single codebase. It achieves this with a combination of three things:

• A layered architecture that is fully extensible, with each layer building on the one below. Not only can developers and designers create rich and consistent experiences across platforms, but they can also seamlessly introduce new features (e.g., new animations) into the stack and immediately have them accessible to higher-level widgets.
• A rich ecosystem of widgets and tools that make application development productive with features like hot stateful reload that allow developers and designers to iterate rapidly on the UI without the inherent delays of traditional full-build cycles.
• A radical approach to UI design where everything (not just visual components but also animation and transition behaviors) is a widget and reactive updates are made performant by intelligently separating persistent view state from frequently updated (recycled) view objects.

Nitya Narasimhan offers an overview of Flutter, covering its architecture and its widget-centric approach to mobile UI design. Nitya then walks you through the process of creating and deploying a simple Flutter app simultaneously for Android and iOS and explores the structure and semantics of Flutter widgets. You’ll learn the benefits and limitations of this new technology. And because Flutter is fully open source, Nitya also shares opportunities for community contributions that can combine personal learning with professional impact.