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Introduction

Page Table of Contents

• Introduction
  • The Goal of this Guide
  • Who is this Guide for?
  • Topics that will be covered
  • Creation Context
  • Structure
  • My Sources

The Goal of this Guide

This guide aims to bridge the gap between the absolute Flutter (Flutter Dev Team 2018e) basics and clean, structured Flutter development. It should bring you from the basics of knowing how to build an app with Flutter to an understanding of how to do it properly. Or at least show you one possible way to make large scale Flutter projects clean and manageable.

Who is this Guide for?

For people with a basic knowledge of the Flutter Framework. I recommend following this tutorial by the Flutter team (Flutter Dev Team 2018f). It will walk you through developing your first flutter application. You should also have a basic understanding of the Dart programming language (Dart Team 2019a). No worries, it is very similar to Java (Oracle 1996), Kotlin (Jet Brains 2017) and JavaScript (ECMA 1997). So if you know 1 or 2 of those languages you should be fine. Lastly, for the Architecture chapter, you should have a basic understanding of Data Streams (Dart Team 2019b).

Topics that will be covered

• A brief introduction to the Flutter Framework in general. How it works under the hood and its underlying structure.
• One possible architecture for your Flutter app and how to implement it (BLoC (Soares 2018))
• How to test your app
• Some conventions and best practices for Dart, BLoC and the Flutter Framework
• My personal opinion of the framework

Creation Context

This guide was written by a student in the Bachelor of Science Program “Computer Science and Media Technology” at Technical University Cologne (Technical University Cologne 2019), and it was created for one of the modules in that Bachelor. In addition to this, the guide was written in collaboration with Capgemini Cologne (Capgemini 2019). Capgemini released a guide on building an application in Angular (Ambuludi, Linares, and Contributors 2019) in May of 2019, this guide is meant to be the the flutter version of that.

Structure

The guide is designed to be read in order, from Chapter 0 (this one) to Chapter 5. Code examples throughout the chapters will mainly be taken from Wisgen (Faust 2019), an example Flutter Application that was specifically built for the purposes of this guide.

My Sources

I am basing this guide on a combination of conference talks, blog articles by respected Flutter developers, official documentaions, scientific papers that cover cross-platform mobile development in gerneral and many other sources. All sources used in the guide are listed in the chapter References. To better understand all the theory, I also developed the Wisgen app (Faust 2019) using the Flutter Framework and the BLoC Pattern (Soares 2018).

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