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Best Mobile App Development Platforms to Build Top-Notch AppsFlutter Architecture: Understanding the Core Components and Features
Updated : Sep 2, 2024
Many entrepreneurs, developers, and tech hobbyists talk about amazing animation, different widgets, or user experiences of the Flutter app. But they sometimes miss out on understanding what Flutter actually is and what does Flutter architecture involve.
Undoubtedly, Flutter is a Google UI toolkit for developing natively compiled and beautiful apps for desktop, web, mobile, and embedded devices from a single codebase. Here, most people get highly confused between the architecture and pattern of an application.
Flutter architecture is a type of blueprint, where you just step back and get a rough division or behavior of the Flutter app and grasp the whole app concept.
What’s more interesting is to know how Flutter architecture proves to be profitable and robust, or how your enterprises can save $100K by using Flutter. This blog uncovers what actually is Flutter and how architecture improves the quality of application lifecycle.
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Flutter is very lightweight as it is all about the UI parts and does not limit you on the way of creating or customizing the Flutter app structure. With cross-platform capabilities, Flutter also works on a single codebase development practice.
Indeed! Flutter 3 is getting highly popular among developers as well as entrepreneurs and app leaders because a single codebase is written in Dart programming language and helps create robust apps with the fastest development lifecycles. Additionally, the Flutter UI toolkit offers a wide range of extensible Dev tools.
Do these Flutter benefits sound business-specific for your app development project needs? Let’s get to the basics of Flutter architecture.
What is Flutter Architecture?
The architecture of Flutter defines how its components are organized and their interactions. Flutter is based on a layered architecture which means that the whole Flutter system is divided into different layers of components. There are many separate libraries which are dependent on each of these layers.
Flutter operates with replaceable parts that are arranged in sequence and no layer can exclusively access the lower layer. As a result, this design offers greater flexibility and extensibility allowing developers to replace or modify one or more parts without affecting the entire system.
Architectural Layers
The architecture of Flutter consists of three development layers. The lowest one is the Embedder, on top of which is the Flutter Engine, and on top of that is the Flutter framework.
Embedder
The embedder layers undertake the heavy lifting necessary to translate how Flutter language works with the particular operating system. It creates an entry point and coordinates with the OS to deliver services like rendering surfacing, message event loop management, inputs, and accessibility.
For example, if you want the Flutter to run on a Play Station 5, you can develop an embedder for this. It creates great capabilities to let Flutter runtime run on your preferred machine.
Flutter Engine
Written in C++, this Flutter engine tackles and handles the heavy liftings in software development like the network requests, input, and output, along with managing the complex translations of rendering.
For example, it takes the benefits of Skia- the rendering engine of Flutter, and transforms the pixels you want to draw by effectively rendering those pixels on the screens.
The Flutter engine is the center point that takes care of the developer's needs, making everything open-source. So, everyone can contribute and explore codes. Basically, it performs all those complex tasks that developers don’t want to experience while creating a Flutter application.
Flutter Framework
It is a very core part of Flutter app architecture. Flutter framework has got the material parts, widgets, or the cupertino, and it becomes the foundation element of application development. This is that part of the Flutter architecture where most of the developers live because developers can easily use these Flutter framework parts and Flutter just renders the stuff. Flutter makes it easy and robust to use the out-of-the-box widgets, animations, gesture detectors, or anything you require for custom software development.
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Reactive User Interfaces
Developers can easily provide a roadmap from the ‘app’ phase to the ‘interface’ phase and the Flutter best mobile app framework updates the interface at runtime. It allows us to rethink varied traditional design and development principles, making Flutter- a reactive pseudo-declarative UI framework.
Along with other reactive frameworks, Flutter takes a unique approach to the traditional UI frameworks. It explicitly decouples UI from its existing form when the developer makes even the tiniest change like the color box, the radio buttons, hue slider, or more. These reactive user interfaces also allow the widgets to declare the user interface by overriding the build() method that converts the state to UI.
UI = f(state)
Indeed, this approach is based on amazing features of flutter app development runtime leveraged from the Dart programming language.
Widgets
Flutter represents all the Widgets as a composition unit. Based on composition, Widgets form a streamlined hierarchy. Widgets are the building blocks of the Flutter app UI. Additionally, each Widget is an established declaration of the UI part.
Let’s make the Flutter Widgets concept easily understandable. The Widget Hierarchy like this:
Every Widget dwells in its parent where they can receive or perceive context from the parent. This is the architecture followed till the root Widget. You can call it ‘the container that actually hosts the application’, for example, CupertinoApp or a MaterialApp.
import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'package:flutter/services.dart';
void main() => runApp(const MyApp());
class MyApp extends StatelessWidget {
const MyApp({super.key});
@override
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
return MaterialApp(
home: Scaffold(
appBar: AppBar(
title: const Text('My Home Page'),
),
body: Center(
child: Builder(
builder: (context) {
return Column(
children: [
const Text('Hello World'),
const SizedBox(height: 20),
ElevatedButton(
onPressed: () {
print('Click!');
},
child: const Text('A button'),
),
],
);
},
),
),
),
);
}
}
All the instantiated classes can be considered as Widgets, as shown above in the preceding code.
Composition
The composition of Widgets involve the combination of varied tiny single-purpose Widgets to derive a powerful effect. This allows the total app vocabulary to be vast and creates a minimalistic approach to the total number of design concepts.
For example, Flutter uses the same concepts (a Widget) in the Widget layer to represent user interactivity, drawing, sizing, positioning, theming, state management, and more. For the animation layer, TweenS and AnimationS are core concepts covering design space. RenderObjects is a core concept used to represent layouts, hit testing, painting, or accessibility. So, there exist hundreds and thousands of widgets, animation, render objects, or tween types making it a composition.
State Management
If every Widget consists of a state, how will the state be managed?
In a class, you can utilize a constructor in a Widget for data initialization. This gives assurance to build() method that the child Widget is instantiated with the flow of data demanded.
@override
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
return ContentWidget(importantState);
}
But, as the Widget tree gets denser, it becomes a complicated affair to pass the state information up or down the Widget tree hierarchy. This is where the third Widget type InheritedWidget offers a seamless way to grasp data from a shared ancestor. So, easily leverage InheritedWidget to create a state Widget circumscribing a common ancestor in the tree hierarchy. Let’s see how:
Flutter itself utilizes InheritedWidget as one of the components of the framework for the shared state. For example, the Flutter app’s visual theme consists of type or color style, which is also pervasive across the whole application.
Container(
color: Theme.of(context).secondaryHeaderColor,
child: Text(
'Text with a background color',
style: Theme.of(context).textTheme.headline,
),
);
Rendering Model
Confused about how this cross-platform framework offers a comparable performance as that of a single-platform framework?
Flutter’s rendering model helps minimize abstractions created out of a typical cross-platform framework. It overrides the system UI Widget libraries, favoring its own set of Widgets. On the flip side, the Dart code that is created for painting the visuals compiles into a native code, using Skia to proceed with the rendering. As a part of the engine, Flutter embeds a copy of Skia, helping developers to easily upgrade apps even if the device is running on the old Android version. The same is the case with installing Flutter on iOS, macOS, or Windows.
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Platform Embedder
Flutter user interfaces are developed, composited, and painted by Flutter itself and not translated into a similar OS Widget. On the other hand, the mechanism of OS participating in the application development lifecycle varies based on the platform requirements. This is a development situation where the platform embedder can be used.
Flutter engine is a platform-agnostic offering Application Binary Interface (ABI) to provide a platform embedder with the way to get started with Flutter.
The platform embedder becomes a native OS app for hosting all the content in Flutter. Basically, it is a glue between Flutter and the host operating system. When you build Flutter app, the platform embedder helps with an entry point, it also initializes the Flutter engine, fetches threads for UI, and develops a texture that even Flutter can use and write too.
This platform embedder is highly responsible for the application lifecycle as it includes the input gestures, thread management, window sizing, and platform messages. Flutter offers platform embedder for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Flutter architecture includes other derivatives for a variety of interoperability mechanisms for integrating with other codes. It includes platform channels, hosting content in parent app, foreign function interface, or rendering native controls in applications, and full fledge web support.
What Makes Flutter Very Unique?
The riches of Flutter are immense when it comes to customized app development, but what makes it go beyond creating next-gen user-friendly apps is more interesting.
Flutter is Completely Open-source
You can easily have Flutter installed locally on your development device.
Flutter is User-friendly
Flutter allows you to jump to each and every class and easily explore or review documentation as well as every attribute exactly where it belongs in the Flutter architecture.
Flutter Allows to Dig into Roots of Widgets
It focuses on the Widgets which are inside of the frontend elements. Flutter allows you to go down into the widget tree even inside of the Flutter framework and explore every step taken by the Flutter team for rendering pixels on the screen.
CLI
Create your own development packages or projects from CLI. Easily run your Flutter applications with many commands. For example, ‘Flutter Doctor’ is one of the popular commands where you can also perform a swift analysis of the code.
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Dev Tools
You can easily create your first Flutter app by looking into the examples, information, and exploration of each Flutter Dev tool. These Flutter Dev tools make it completely handy for developers to create a robust app. All data from how to develop a widget, app performance analysis, the whole Flutter architecture, the bugs or errors, and many things become handy for the Flutter developers.
Dart Language
This language also consists of a secure development system that reduces the volume of errors instantaneously. Side by side, Dart programming language also involves TDD (Test Driven Development) which allows developers to see beyond the static development issues. So, get rid of the bad logic by embracing TTD featured in Dart.
Hot Reload and Hot Restart
Keep the state of the Flutter applications and reload it with the new development elements you want to infuse into the application. It saves development time extremely making it fun to develop apps using Flutter. It’ll be valuable if you acquire acquaintance with all you need to know about Flutter development.
Tool Integration
If you are using any IDEs like VS Code or IntelliJ, you get complete integration support with Flutter. Be it code completion, extraction of varied widgets, or CLI implementations, Flutter offers a lot of integration and extension capabilities.
The architecture of Flutter applications and the way data is streamlined can make a big difference between user-friendly and common user experiences. So, understanding all the concepts involved in Flutter architecture as described above can help to build a robust mobile app in Flutter.
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How Can Enterprises Save $100K by Using Flutter?
Let's explore a business situation to understand how we can save app development costs with Flutter.
If your enterprise has developed a mobile application in Flutter, the direction of your business gradually transforms. Unfortunately, your enterprise now needs a web app instead of a mobile app. At this moment, there's no point in maintaining a Flutter mobile app, but you do have a fair amount of code in Dart that can be reused to create the required web app. Opting Flutter web app development solution for web app in such uncertain business situation makes it most important to understand the values driven by Flutter.
Indeed! Flutter goes beyond its cool nature of portability. Under such type of business situations, if you have opted for a traditional web technology or digital products created with ReactJS or NodeJS or any other frameworks, you need to rewrite the codes in JavaScript. This draws a line between Flutter vs React Native.
You might have to face the reality that the hired Flutter developer will need to be replaced with React developer or NodeJS developer. Now, this bears a real cost for any company. With Flutter, you can save your project cost, time, energy, and resources by reusing written codes and leveraging the capability of portability.
So, wait no more to save $100K or even more by simply using or reusing Flutter for your app product line. Using Flutter and hiring dedicated Flutter app developers would save you hundreds and thousands of dollars rather than digging a hole in your pocket.
Let's racket into a robust app development lifecycle with Flutter.
To SummarizeFlutter is a robust UI toolkit to create engaging and innovative applications. It has a flexible and extensible architecture that can be easily modified to build the desired applications. However, you need the right development team to unlock the full potential of Flutter and develop cutting-edge applications.Radixweb has the best team of Flutter developers who are proficient in developing a wide range of mobile applications. You can leverage our Flutter app development services to craft appealing, feature-rich, and native applications for your business.Build scalable cross-platform applications that will run on iOS, Android, web, and other platforms with a single codebase using Flutter. Contact us to get more details and discuss your project.
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