What Does Flutter 2.8 Bring To The Table?
Table of Contents ●
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1) Everything new in Flutter 2.8 ○
1. Latest features and enhancements
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2. Developing games with Flame
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3. DevTools
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4. Viewing web platforms
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5. Flutter Ads GA
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6. Dev channel removal
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7. DartPad enhancements
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8. DartPad and Firebase
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9. Document Mapping or Firestore Object
2) Wrapping it up
Introduction ●
Just a short while ago, Google announced the latest version of Flutter – its open-source app development framework. With every iteration, developers gain access to new and improved features.
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If you’re a developer, or if you’re planning to get a flutter app developed for your startup business, you should continue reading. This topic will provide you with a few insights on Flutter 2.8. With the arrival of this version, Flutter took another step towards desktop support stability.
Everything new in Flutter 2.8 One of the most noteworthy specialties of Flutter is that it can support desktop, mobile, and web development in just one SDK. This particular feature lets developers prioritize what they hope to build. It also negates the problem of selecting the app development platform. Flutter delivers the highest levels of performance. In other words, it’s a highly productive framework. With just one codebase, developers gain the ability to target several platforms for developing applications.
1. Latest features and enhancements Flutter 2.8 primarily focuses on mobile performance. Also, the new update simplified the task of connecting apps to backend services, including Google Cloud and Firebase. The latest release brought forth significant upgrades to the web and camera plugins. Flutter 2.8 also brings the newest version of Dart 2.15 with concurrency improvements. Additionally, Google made some improvements in Flutter to facilitate developer productivity. Features like “hot reload” can be worthwhile to developers. The sign-in widget that comes with this release utilizes Firebase to manage authentication. By using it, you can forget about resetting passwords or two-factor authentications.
2. Developing games with Flame Contrary to popular belief, Flutter isn’t just for developing applications. Developers are attempting to use it to build games too. Developers from almost every community want to leverage the hardware-accelerated graphics support Flutter has to offer. Even the creators of Flutter talked about releasing Flame 1.0. It’s a game engine that a developer can use to build 2D games. It has all the features you need to finish creating your game within the shortest possible time. It also has a component system, animated images and sprites, a world camera, collision detection, and other features. Developers can extend the abilities of Flame by combining it with extra packages and integrating other libraries. For instance, Flame can merge perfectly with packages like Forge2D, Fire Atlas, Rive, etc. By connecting Flame with these systems, developers can offer 2D game development as a service.
3. DevTools Flutter 2.8 brings a feature called “Enhance tracing” to manage debugging issues. It allows developers to fix the stemming of the UI. As soon as a tracing feature gets enabled, it will render laid-out objects, include new events for created widgets, and render painted objects. The latest version of DevTools can add support to gauge an app’s performance level. This profile has the CPU samples from initializing DartVM to rendering the first frame of Flutter. As soon as you press the button called “App Start Profile” to load the app’s profile, you’ll notice that an “AppStartUp” tag gets selected. You may also select the filter for the user tag from the list of the available ones to load the launch profile of the application.
4. Viewing web platforms Flutter 2.8 has also augmented the performance of the Flutter web platform view. The platform view lets developers host the components of the UI. Flutter web does it with the help of a widget called HTMLElementView. With this widget, you can host the elements of HTML inside the web app of Flutter. Users generally rely on the platform views by default whenever they use the web versions of the video_player plugin or Google_maps_flutter plugin. The moment you embed the platform view in an older version, it’ll create a new canvas. Furthermore, more canvases will get added every time you include platform views. It’ll cost you a lot of money to create the extra canvases as each of the measures as much as an entire window.
5. Flutter Ads GA Google Mobile SDK will be generally available for Flutter. The newest version of the framework supports five different formats of ads. With time, it will integrate support for Ad Manager and AdMob. There’s also a beta version of the latest mediation feature that lets you optimize the performance of ads.
6. Dev channel removal The so-called “channels” of Flutter ascertain how quickly the framework and engine will change on the development machine. The most stable version delivers the smallest amount of churning, while the master will cause the largest amount of churning. Due to the unavailability of resources, developers had to stop updating the channel of development. At the moment, less than 3% of all Flutter developers utilize development channels. Naturally, the majority has decided to initiate the process of discontinuing development channels officially. After all, they have to invest a lot of effort and time for maintaining it. Top rated Flutter app development company can dedicate their time and energy elsewhere as they don’t have to maintain the channel. They can also decide on the channel they want to use. ●
The stable channels are the best builds in terms of quality. They get published quarterly and used as the fix for several critical issues.
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Beta channels are secondary to the stable variants, and they’re specifically for users in search of faster cadence. Beta channels get released every month and remain stable before the release.
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The active development channel is the master channel. It’s for advanced users and contributors that can work with unstable builds.
7. DartPad enhancements The DartPad also features several improvements. For starters, it now supports a massive number of packages. Developers have twenty-three packages available for importing. This list of packages includes characters, bloc, google_fonts, collection, and others. In the future, the DartPad team will add more packages. Another feature of DartPad is quite interesting. Until now, the newest stable version is constantly running on DartPad. In Flutter 2.8, you can resort to the New Channel menu in the status bar to pick the latest release of the beta channel and the earlier stable version.
8. DartPad and Firebase Thanks to the initialization of FlutterFire, development specialists can utilize Firebase from inside DartPad. The Firebase support for DartPad includes authentication, the core API, and Firestore. There’s a possibility that more Firebase services will come to DartPad soon. Another specialty of FlutterFire support is that you can use DartPad’s embedded instances directly in your documents. Also Read: Google Ads, eBay, Toyota, Betterment, Amazon Uses Flutter For Development, Why?
9. Document Mapping or Firestore Object Finally, the alpha version of DocumentMapper or Firestore Object is a new feature that you should know about. It’s fundamentally an integration of Flutter and Firebase. The design of Firestore ODM is such that it increases the productivity of the developers. It does so by simplifying the use of Firestore via structured and type-safe methods and objects developers are familiar with. It utilizes code generation to improve the syntax for working with collections and documents. Furthermore, it’ll allow users to mold data in a type-safe manner. The ODM also provides all-inclusive support to authoritatively typed sub-collections with built-in optimization options for the rebuilding of widgets using selected features.
Wrapping it up Flutter 2.8 focuses on simplifying things when it comes to connecting applications to backend services, including Firebase of Google. In that regard, all the Firebase plugins for Flutter underwent significant changes in “stable” and “beta.” Furthermore, there’s an official and easy-to-use application for signing in to the apps via Firebase Authentication. Just like in the past, the latest update of Flutter comes with an update for Dart too. The latest Dart programming language SDK is now at the version of Flutter 2.15. Some of the performance improvements elucidated here have been possible because of this update. It means users of Dart, apart from Flutter, will definitely run into a few enhancements.
