One of the options for creating an app at this year's DevCamp is Flutter, Google's open source SDK for building native iOS and Android apps from a single codebase. The Flutter team will be hanging around at the event, and for those of you interested in giving Flutter a try, we've prepared this gist as an installation cheat sheet.
- Flutter uses the Dart programming language. It's a strongly typed, garbage-collected language with syntax that will look familiar to devs who've used Java or JavaScript. You can learn more about it at the Dart website.
- Apps made with Flutter can be built for either Android or iOS, so the developer tools for those platforms are used during the build process. If you're just building for Android, though, you won't need Xcode, and iOS-only builds don't require the Android SDK to build and run.
- You can use any editor you want. There are official plugins for VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA, and Android Studio, plus a suite of command line tools.
- If you're ever in doubt about whether your machine is set up correctly,
run
flutter doctorfrom the command line. It'll tell you if anything is missing from your setup.
First, head to the Get Started guide.
There are detailed steps for Windows, MacOS, and Linux machines. The first
step is always to download and install the Flutter SDK. After that, the
guide (and flutter doctor) will walk you through the remaining steps.
Feel free to skip the Android sections if you plan to build and test
exclusively on iOS during DevCamp.
Once the Flutter SDK is installed along with at least one platform's
development tools (Xcode or the Android SDK), you're ready to start
building apps with a text editor and the command line flutter tool.
You'll probably want to use an IDE, though, so check out the editor setup guide on the Flutter website. It will walk you through downloading plugins for the editor of your choice.
Once your system is ready to go, try creating your first app. In particular, try making some changes and using hot reload. It's one of Flutter's best features, and allows you to update your code without rebuilding from scratch and losing the current state of the app.
The developer relations team for Flutter is constantly creating resources to help people get on board and build their skills with Flutter. There's also a growing community of devs using the SDK to create sample apps, demos, articles, videos, and more.
Some great places to check out as you dive into Flutter are:
- The Flutter web site, flutter.io.
- The Flutter cookbook of code snippets
- The Flutter samples repository on GitHub.
- Flutter's library of step-by-step codelabs.
- The Widgets 101 miniseries on YouTube.
- Talks on app development and state management from Google I/O.
- The Awesome Flutter list of great Flutter resources.
There's also a Google Group for Flutter devs, and we're always happy to help with questions.