Flutter Tips and Tricks: Lesser-known features and shortcuts.
December 10, 2023
Flutter Web: Building web applications with Flutter.
December 15, 2023
The extensive widget ecosystem that Flutter offers developers is a big part of what makes it so popular. These widgets are what make up the majority of any Flutter app. They can be as simple as a text label, or they can be an interactive layout with many elements, but in all cases, they make developing highly functional and visually appealing applications much more efficient.
In this article, we will go over these widgets to hopefully help you understand how to use them better.
Exploring Flutter Widgets
The roots of Flutter’s flexibility and extensibility come from being entirely built on top custom UI components. This modular approach enables interfaces to be assembled with unmatched precision and customizability compared to other frameworks out there. The ecosystem ranges from simple stateless widgets to complex stateful widgets, representing two different ways for the widgets to interact with the user interface.
One thing you may find amusing about them is their composition. You can nest many widgets within each other countless times. This creates intricate designs and functionalities without heavy lifting or coding at all! For example, adding a text widget inside a padding widget would add spacing. Similarly, embedding a row of buttons inside a column would give it structure.
Take note, though, that the ecosystem is growing every day. This is thanks to contributions from the community and its creators at Google. This way, developers need a shorter time to create apps because ready-to-use solutions are provided. Moreover, innovation stays high because developers can share work.
Guide to Common Flutter Widgets
Flutter packs a lot of widgets, but you’ll only use a handful of them to make your UI. Like the Text widget that is used as a base text element for all cases. You can display strings of text with customizable styles and alignments here. The Container widget, on the other hand, provides a box model that can contain other widgets and properties for padding, margins, and decoration.
Widgets like Button, Slider, and TextField are used to modify how Flutter behaves when users interact with it. Each one follows material design principles to ensure apps have modern and cohesive experiences across all devices.
FlatButton, RaisedButton, and IconButton depending on your style and functionality needs. For Slider you allow users to pick values between a range (the range being defined by you). The TextField widget comes with built-in decoration and validation capabilities baked into itAside from how your app reacts to user input, you must also consider the positioning. The Row, Column, and Stack widgets let you layer widgets on top of each other. The Row and Column widgets are fundamental for creating horizontal and vertical layouts. This allows developers to arrange other widgets linearly. The Stack widget, on the other hand, enables the layering of widgets on top of each other, offering a way to create overlapping elements. On top of these three fundamental layout widgets GridView and ListView offer even more flexibility by allowing you to create grid- or list-based designs.
