Hi people,

My name is Anish Natekar and I am the facilitator for Flutter Festival for GDSC IIT Goa. I will be taking 5 sessions throughout the festival and show you how to build apps using Flutter. After each session, I will provide a practice assignment along with some online free resources to follow to increase your understanding of Flutter.

Flutter is an app development framework that uses the language Dart developed by Google engineers to support cross-platform development.

Flutter has a clean look due to the material design library added in by default and its simple widgets. A widget is a basic UI or structural component e.g. text, text style, button, row, column, etc.

The major reason why Flutter appeals to developers is the fact that from a single code base one can create apps for multiple platforms example android, ios, web, and desktop too.

The widget tree based UI system of flutter makes it simpler to make a prototype app much faster and its AOT & JIT compilation along with hot reload allows faster applications that are comparable to native ones in terms of speed.

One may ask that is it worth learning a new language to start using flutter? The Dart programming language is really simple to learn and has a lot in common with java, javascript, and python. for someone coming from a web development background, it will be really relatable. It is designed for cross platform implementation in mind and is suitable for production while saving money as one does not have to hire separate teams for maintaining each platform. This makes flutter appeal to many startups and individual developers. Google also provides the best documentation which contains tutorials, articles, and more.

To go into more depth in a short duration I recommend watching these two videos by the youtube channel fireship.

Now that we have got an idea of what flutter is along with an introduction to dart let's jump right into the dart syntax. We will use the DartPad website to practice some code examples and learn the syntax, this will show how similar dart is to other languages.

I will take the examples provided in the official dart documentation and some other ones taken from the flutter playlist by The Net Ninja.

Now that we have covered the basic syntax of Dart we have to Install Android studio. I will share a google doc containing the installation instructions for Android studio, Flutter, and an Android emulator. There will also be a separate doc for debugging commonly faced errors.

I will show a brief example of what you should expect after the installation of android studio and Flutter. When you select on new flutter app it will add all these files into the folder you had selected and when you run it it will display a default counter app on your emulator screen.