FLUTTER WIDGETS: AN INTRODUCTION
Introduction
Flutter was introduced in 2018 by google to develop cross-platform native mobile applications. The UI of flutter is impressive and the toolkit provides various modern and reactive solutions for app development. Flutter widgets framework works on Google's in-house Dart language which seems much easier to learn than other programming languages.
Though, one of the most impressive features of the Flutter framework is its widgets. We can say flutter is everything because of its diverse widgets and is most considered by developers. Whatever you code in flutter it will be basically inside the widget. The central idea revolves around how your application will look and how it will portray the base idea about your app. This will basically help to make Flutter future-ready for enterprise app development The collaboration of widgets actually builds your app. In short, everything you see in your app is a widget from design, to display to features. Widget in flutter is used to determine what to draw on the screen. This is the hope the flutter widget works:
[Root]
My app
Material App
My Home Page
Scaffold
Center
Column
Text
App Bar
FloatingActionButton
Icon
This is how flutter works in layers on the screen. Once the flutter widget is created it can't be changed means that they are immutable. Though, Flutter handles this by changing the whole set of widgets. When an application needs change, it gives flutter a new set of widgets. Though, this sounds like a waste of time and effort. But Flutter is designed in a way that it can handle updates in the widget try very efficiently. Behind the scenes elements and render objects keep track of where the widget is in relation to other widgets, whether things need to be rebuilt based on state, and updating the screen as needed.
Types of widgets
Generally, flutter widgets are of two types visible including output and input and invisible layout and control. These are the basic types of flutter widgets. Let's briefly get into this.
1. Visible Widgets
Visible widgets are basically related to the user input and output data. Here are some crucial types of visible widgets.
Text
The text widget is one of the important widgets as it covers a prominent place in the application. The text widget can be aligned through the textAlign. Even though style one can customize the text according to the need. It covers font, font weight, font style, letter spacing, colour, dimensions, and many more.
Button
This widget helps in going towards other functions through the action of click. As all the flutter developers are well known for the fact that flutter does not allow to use of the button widget directly so it uses other buttons such as RaisedButton and Flat button.
Image
Images create a visual appearance in your application so introducing effective images into your app is a must. This widget can be fetched through various other sources as well it can be through the asserted property or from the URL. image loading needs various constructors, these are:
Image: It is a simple image loader, that works through ImageProvider.
memory: It loads from the memory.
network: It loads through the network.
asset: It loads your image through the project asset folder.
file: It loads through the system folder.
How does an image widget work? To add an image firstly the developer needs to create the asset folder where all the images are stored and then add the Image. asset('assets/computer.png') in the pubspec.yaml file.
Icons
This widget is the storehouse for adding icons to your application. Icons are also one of the major aspects of the visual representation of your app. The following code is generated to add an icon to your app. Check the example below:
2. Invisible Widgets
Invisible widgets have layout and control properties. These widgets are actually what manage the working of visible widgets. These deliver how other layouts are going to look and function on the screen.
Column
This widget enables all the widgets to be arranged in vertical alignment. The spacing is used through crossAxisAlignment and mainAxisAlignment properties. These alignments have different properties. The cross axis uses the horizontal axis and the main axis uses the vertical axis.
Row
This widget works similarly to the column widget. The major difference between both is the representation; the row widget is represented horizontally. This widget is exactly opposite to the column its cross axis is the vertical axis and the main axis is the horizontal axis.
Padding
This widget provides padding in some specified directions as instructed and as specified in the design.
Why Widget is important?
Flutter SDK is nothing without a widget. As we have said earlier Flutter is nothing without its widgets. Flutter has various widgets which showcase different functionality on screen and even every widget has its own particular purpose. Though, putting up an individual widget together add up to a great interface. Though, flutter widgets built the best native applications.
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