Flutter

Introduction Instead of writing code yourself, you can always use generators to create Dart model classes from JSON. Here are the results of my evaluation of some free tools for you. For this test, I created a sample JSON structure that all tools need to deal with. You can find it below: Every converter will receive the same input and I’ll examine the created output. Is it runnable? Is null-safety supported? Is the code efficient? Is anything missing? Have a look at the results below. ...

Introduction A new Flutter project contains a lot of files and folders. In this article, we’ll inspect them and reveal their purposes. Let’s start with an overview of what a standard Flutter project with version 3.0 will contain. We will have a look at each item in the list and discuss its purpose. Screenshot of default Flutter project structure by author .dart_tool folder ...

Introduction The pubspec.yaml file is the main configuration file for your Flutter app. In this article, we’ll have a look at its contents. When developing a Flutter app or package, you’ll eventually come across the pubspec.yaml file. I’ll give you an overview of the contents and how to work with the file. It contains package dependency information, SDK version constraints, or project settings like the name. The used syntax is YAML, an easy-to-use and understandable format. Pay attention to indentation, colons, and link breaks. Otherwise, there will be parsing errors by the Flutter/Dart tooling. ...

Introduction If you are not feeling well, you go and see a doctor. The same goes for Flutter. The Flutter diagnostics tool helps you identify configuration problems that might hinder a successful development workflow. As the output can be very helpful, it is required to include a diagnostic summary in every bug report in the official Flutter GitHub repository. Let’s have a look at the tool and its results. Calling the doctor Run the command flutter doctor from your preferred command-line tool. Your output might look similar to this one: ...

Introduction In this article, we are having a look at location services and how we can get the current position of the device in our Flutter application. Location information can be used in various app scenarios. Maybe you want to show points of interest to the users or guide them towards a specific area. Either way, you will need access to the current location of the device. I’ll show you how to accomplish this task. ...

Introduction In this article, we are looking at the Flutter CLI and its most common use cases for building, testing, deploying, and running Flutter applications. When developing Flutter apps with code editors like Visual Studio Code, Android Studio, or XCode, you don’t need to use the command-line tools of Flutter in general. But all these editors use them internally all the time, probably without you noticing it. So let’s dive into the Flutter CLI and see what its capabilities are. ...

Introduction In this article, I am going to present my top 5 free extensions for Visual Studio Code to you. They offer a jump start for your development progress. VS Code is a very good code editor, not only in my opinion (see StackOverflow developer survey 2021). But today’s tools can be enhanced with extensions to make them perfect for your specific tasks. Here are the extensions that I use as a Flutter developer. ...

Introduction This article is all about the possibilities of mocking that the Mockito package provides. We’ll look into setting up mocks, verifying the calls, and pitfalls to avoid. I recently published an article about mocking in unit tests with the Mockito package in Flutter apps. This follow-up article is a cheat sheet for you to quickly find an example of how to use the package. I also updated the GitHub repository of the original post and it now contains the cheat sheet as a working test class. ...