Mastering Flutter Widgets: A Beginner’s Guide to Customization!

What is Flutter?

Flutter is an open-source UI toolkit developed by the Google team used to build beautiful and natively compiled applications from scratch with a single codebase. In simple terms, a Flutter application can run on both iOS and Android devices without having to use native programming languages like Java or Swift for development.

The whole concept of the Flutter framework is based on Flutter widgets. So, what are Flutter widgets and how do we create and use them?

Flutter Widgets:

Flutter widgets are like building materials. For example, if you are building a house, you need different materials like sand, cement, bricks, wood, and so on. When starting, you have just a piece of empty land, but as you mix all these different materials with one another and on top of one another, you end up with a beautiful home.

This is the exact way Flutter widgets work in real life. They are used to give structure to our applications. Flutter applications are usually made up of a bunch of widgets laid out on screen in a tree structure called a widget tree. This means widgets have a relationship with one another, a parent-child relationship that allows us to use them in a more flexible way.

Now, Flutter comes pre-packed with many awesome widgets out of the box that allows swift development of multi-platform applications, which is great, but it does not end there. In Flutter, the Google team created Flutter with developers in mind. They made it more flexible. Not only do we have access to an epitome of awesome Flutter pre-built widgets, but we can also create our custom widgets.

Why go through the trouble of creating your custom widgets?

I know it seems counterintuitive going through the trouble of creating custom widgets from scratch when literally any widgets you will need have been created by the Flutter team. In most cases, as a developer, you will need a certain level of customization to your applications that cannot be gotten from the pre-built Flutter widgets. This is where custom widgets come into light. Using basic Flutter widgets to create your custom widget makes it truly yours. When it comes to Flutter custom widgets, your imagination is your limit.

Extracting custom Flutter widgets:

Extracting Flutter widgets is straightforward. Most of the time, in our application UI, we have many widgets that are recurring over our entire application, meaning we are going to have a lot of repeated code. In order to keep our applications D.R.Y (Don’t Repeat Yourself), Flutter allows us to extract widgets into their class. Anywhere on our application where we need that UI component, we call that class. It greatly cuts down on the number of code lines we have to write to achieve the same result.

Customizing Extracted Widgets:

Flutter widgets can be customized to meet the needs of your application, even extracted widgets. Flutter allows us to create fields in the widget class, creating a constructor for our class, and passing values to initialize the properties in the class. These properties are then passed in as values to any part of the extracted widget that requires to change. It might be a color, a text, or an image.

In conclusion, the flexibility and power of Flutter widgets in creating highly customized applications is truly remarkable. The ability to extract and customize widgets enables developers to achieve a higher level of functionality and unique design for their applications. Overall, Flutter provides an excellent framework for creating cross-platform applications with a single code base and a vast library of pre-built widgets to enhance development speed and efficiency.