What is a Flutter?
Flutter is a cross-platform mobile application solution that helps users create a beautiful UI. To get rid of the stereotypical apps of the past, the interface design of Flutter is similar to that of a Web App. Therefore, you can feel familiar with Flutter as you would with HTML/CSS.
“Google says That Flutter will make it easier and faster to create aesthetically pleasing mobile applications.”
Is it as good as Google says it is? We can see that there are many cross-platform development solutions on the market, such as Xamarin, PhoneGap, Ionic, React Native, etc. These solutions have advantages and disadvantages and are difficult to choose. So what’s different about the emergence of Flutter? What are the advantages of these alternatives? GMTC invited Yu Xiao, senior engineer of Google’s Flutter team, to talk about the features of Flutter.
InfoQ China’s brief interview with Xiao is as follows:
1. We can see from your personal experience that you have been engaged in software development of different mobile platforms in recent years. After joining Google, you have also been responsible for the development of YouTube android front end.
Yu xiao: I personally think it’s an exciting time for mobile platform software development. Since I started in the industry, the number of mobile apps on Android and iOS has increased eightfold and fourfold in their respective app stores.
Over the past few years, creative ideas and innovative thinking have mushroomed in mobile software. A few years ago I would never have imagined that nowadays people just need a mobile phone to go out.
In this rapid development, I believe the fierce competition and diversity unique to the industry will encourage mobile software developers to develop better and better-designed products. There are traces of this trend, similar to the trajectory of web software a few years ago.
This rapid growth is great for users, but it is also exciting for mobile software developers. As long as you have a good idea that will help users, you can enter this market and achieve success and impact.
Based on this premise, Flutter was born. Our mission is to help dynamic and creative communities efficiently achieve industry-leading software development quality and design.
2. We see that you are currently responsible for the development of Google Flutter framework. At the 2018 Mobile World Congress, Google released the first beta version of Flutter, which was highly praised by the entire tech community.
Yu Xiao: To put it simply, Flutter is a set of SDK solutions created by Google to help people create quality, expressive and native mobile experience with the fastest speed. Initially we tried to build software development frameworks using some of the most widely used technologies, but eventually we decided to take a more revolutionary approach. We believe that this unique approach has helped us achieve our goals more successfully, achieving a balance between efficiency, performance and performance.
Today, several years later, Flutter is being used worldwide by mobile platform developers and organizations in various countries, but it remains and always will be a free open source software.
3. We see that there are many cross-platform frameworks on the market. What do you think is the advantage of Flutter launched by Google?
Yu xiao: There are many good cross-platform frameworks out there. But our goal is much simpler: to create the best mobile software development approach.
Specifically, we think this means:
- Help developers and their teams maintain peak productivity through a Hot Reload and a declarative and Reactive framework.
- We offer a rich set of components. But this set of components is also built on top of our unique base toolkit that can be freely combined and layered. This capability enables our users to easily create their own design language and brand customized unique interfaces. This means that we not only provide our customers with a superhigh performance sports car, but also an efficient assembly line car manufacturing plant.
- In order to achieve this goal without sacrificing, we edited the ARM code directly to ensure high performance on iOS and Android. Carefully crafted strap components also build the original feel.
4.Flutter was created to help users develop beautiful native applications. As a revolutionary point in the framework, how does Flutter implement UI components?
Yu Xiao: Actually, every pixel in all our components is rendered by our own engine.
At the lowest level, we use the mature Skia 2D rendering engine to draw text and basic shapes. Android, Chrome, and Firefox are all based on Skia. On this basis, we are free to build a set of interface building apis that best achieve the above goals.
For example, being able to render the UI ourselves allows us to create an API with true composability, thus simplifying the assembly of custom interfaces. On the other hand, if every component has a heavy HTML DOM widget behind it, or an Android or iOS widget, it’s hard to create a lightweight, multi-layered UI component.
As a new technology, Flutter is still in its early stage of market application. As a researcher of this technology, what do you think about the future of Flutter? Will Flutter be the next big thing?
Yu xiao: As you said, we are still a relatively new technology. We cannot predict the future, but we are optimistic about Flutter’s prospects.
Our primary goal is to help developers achieve high efficiency and quality without sacrificing performance. So we were pleased when our users consistently reported that Flutter helped them be 2 to 2.5 times more productive.
We are also grateful for the overwhelming response we received at Google I/O this year. In addition, we have been helping to organize multiple I/O parallel Flutter Extended activities to help developers around the world become familiar with Flutter. More than 15,000 developers from 41 countries have participated.
From the perspective of the larger Internet community, we’ve already got 25,000 stars on GitHub since announcing the beta, and it’s quickly becoming GitHub’s project of the month. These achievements have come much earlier than we had expected. Therefore, we are very confident about the future of Flutter.
6. As a senior mobile development practitioner, I should have experienced a lot of wind and rain and stepped on many pits. Can you give us some advice on mobile development for young software developers or share some future trends?
Yu xiao: At the current pace of technology development, I think it’s important to continue to learn and absorb new knowledge and ideas that are constantly emerging in the industry. People are usually facing and solving the same type of problems.
At the same time, it is equally important not to blindly adopt, but to fully understand the context of these best practices and what specific problems they can solve within your team.
Above is Mr. Yu Xiao’s brief introduction to the Flutter framework. More detailed information about Flutter will be shared by Mr. Yu at THE GMTC Conference. If you are interested in Flutter, don’t miss it
GMTC Global Big Front-end Technology Conference joins hands with top co-creators: APICloud enterprise Internet ecological platform, which took half a year to prepare, sorted out the latest trends in the current big front-end field for everyone, and invited front-line front-end experts from Google, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Hulu and other foreign countries to share their cutting-edge technologies and best practices. More iOS community god Mattt, Apollo GraphQL and other danniu support, in addition, Moon Shadow, Winter, Midu, Cheng Mo, Master, Xiao Chun and other 50+ domestic well-known front-end leaders will also bring wonderful sharing, it can be said that the dry stuff is full, not to be lost.
At present, the registration countdown is 15 days, group purchase more preferential, to buy as soon as possible! If you have any questions during the registration process, please consult ticket Sister for help: 18514549229 (same as wechat).