Flutter was introduced back in May 2017 with the general idea of Cross-Platform app development initially for Android and iOS and aiming for a Web and Desktop platform. It’s been quite a while since Flutter for Android and iOS went into a stable version and even more since the first mention about using Flutter for the web. Earlier the project was codenamed HummingBird but at the Google IO earlier this month, Flutter for Web was made public as Technical Preview aiming to build highly interactive and graphics-rich content for the web.
While releasing Flutter 1.0 on Dec’18 the Flutter team disclosed their further plan and goals in Flutter which involves making Flutter build apps for the web and can be read from their Roadmap.
Flutter for the web is a code-compatible implementation of Flutter that is administered using various standard web technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript. One interesting thing that amuses me is the fact that one can reuse the existing Flutter code to be deployed into any web server, with all the features of Flutter and you don’t even have to use any browser plugin.
If you don’t know, Google has provided a new technical update for its framework Flutter. Now the popular development tool has been upgraded with new software to handle more complicated web applications.
If you are acquainted with the developing world and have some interest in this world. You should know that it is an open-source framework that makes it easier to build user interfaces for applications. It has large community support and is now used by 500,000 engineers worldwide and plays a significant role in Google’s developer strategy.
As the user interface is such a basic component of applications, including Android and Chrome OS applications. It greatly reduces the amount of work involved in building these interfaces. Through this Google supports and maintains the developer ecosystem around its products.
Talking about the prime feature of Flutter, it is known for its cross-platform support. Developers who use Flutter only need to create an interface once and will work automatically across Android, iOS, Windows, and Linux with equal efficiency. It greatly reduced the time to build cross-platform services. The significance of Flutter is not confined to mobile applications.
It is also used to build interfaces for web applications. And this time, the focus of Google is to enhance this ability to another level.
Now the search giant detailed several enhancements it’s been working on to make Flutter more significant for web development. These include support for applications with more sophisticated graphics, performance improvements, and the addition of certain essential basic features.
Flutter through its default features renders visuals using the HTML DOM, the technology browsers use to organize web pages. In an experimental feature, Google has allowed applications to use the high-performance Skia graphics engine instead of this task. Talking Skia is known for being the engine that Google’s Chrome browser uses to execute all graphics-related operations, which provide fast speed operations in comparison to default HTML DOM rendering.
This technology will empower developers to try and build more design-rich web applications. One early adopter, design software provider Rive Inc., has already rewritten its namesake animation platform to use Flutter and the Skia-powered browser rendering features.
This time, Google has also enhanced Flutterby speeding up the loading of text inside applications, a basic yet essential process. Google has also launched a new opt-in feature in Flutter that developers can use to speed the process of enabling text layouts up to sixfold. Along the same lines, for enabling snappier interfaces, Google has been working on speeding up application scrolling performance.
If we believe some reports, the search engine giant will soon add several basic features that have been missing from Flutter so far to make web applications work more scalable and efficient. These include support for the back button in browsers and keyboard-based scrolling, as well as the ability to copy and paste the text.
