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slider, the radio buttons. as the user interacts with the UI, changes must be |
reflected in every other place. worse, unless care is taken, a minor change to |
one part of the user interface can cause ripple effects to seemingly unrelated |
pieces of code. |
one solution to this is an approach like MVC, where you push data changes to the |
model via the controller, and then the model pushes the new state to the view |
via the controller. however, this also is problematic, since creating and |
updating UI elements are two separate steps that can easily get out of sync. |
flutter, along with other reactive frameworks, takes an alternative approach to |
this problem, by explicitly decoupling the user interface from its underlying |
state. with react-style APIs, you only create the UI description, and the |
framework takes care of using that one configuration to both create and/or |
update the user interface as appropriate. |
in flutter, widgets (akin to components in react) are represented by immutable |
classes that are used to configure a tree of objects. these widgets are used to |
manage a separate tree of objects for layout, which is then used to manage a |
separate tree of objects for compositing. flutter is, at its core, a series of |
mechanisms for efficiently walking the modified parts of trees, converting trees |
of objects into lower-level trees of objects, and propagating changes across |
these trees. |
a widget declares its user interface by overriding the build() method, which |
is a function that converts state to UI: |
the build() method is by design fast to execute and should be free of side |
effects, allowing it to be called by the framework whenever needed (potentially |
as often as once per rendered frame). |
this approach relies on certain characteristics of a language runtime (in |
particular, fast object instantiation and deletion). fortunately, dart is |
particularly well suited for this |
task. |
<topic_end> |
<topic_start> |
widgets |
as mentioned, flutter emphasizes widgets as a unit of composition. widgets are |
the building blocks of a flutter app’s user interface, and each widget is an |
immutable declaration of part of the user interface. |
widgets form a hierarchy based on composition. each widget nests inside its |
parent and can receive context from the parent. this structure carries all the |
way up to the root widget (the container that hosts the flutter app, typically |
MaterialApp or CupertinoApp), as this trivial example shows: |
<code_start> |
import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; |
import 'package:flutter/services.dart'; |
void main() => runApp(const MyApp()); |
class MyApp extends StatelessWidget { |
const MyApp({super.key}); |
@override |
widget build(BuildContext context) { |
return MaterialApp( |
home: scaffold( |
appBar: AppBar( |
title: const Text('My home page'), |
), |
body: center( |
child: builder( |
builder: (context) { |
return column( |
children: [ |
const Text('Hello world'), |
const SizedBox(height: 20), |
ElevatedButton( |
onPressed: () { |
print('Click!'); |
}, |
child: const Text('A button'), |
), |
], |
); |
}, |
), |
), |
), |
); |
} |
} |
<code_end> |
in the preceding code, all instantiated classes are widgets. |
apps update their user interface in response to events (such as a user |
interaction) by telling the framework to replace a widget in the hierarchy with |
another widget. the framework then compares the new and old widgets, and |
efficiently updates the user interface. |
flutter has its own implementations of each UI control, rather than deferring to |
those provided by the system: for example, there is a pure dart |
implementation of both the |
iOS toggle |
control |
and the one for the |
android equivalent. |
this approach provides several benefits: |
<topic_end> |
<topic_start> |
composition |
widgets are typically composed of many other small, single-purpose widgets that |
combine to produce powerful effects. |
where possible, the number of design concepts is kept to a minimum while |
allowing the total vocabulary to be large. for example, in the widgets layer, |
flutter uses the same core concept (a widget) to represent drawing to the |
screen, layout (positioning and sizing), user interactivity, state management, |
theming, animations, and navigation. in the animation layer, a pair of concepts, |
animations and tweens, cover most of the design space. in the rendering |
layer, RenderObjects are used to describe layout, painting, hit testing, and |
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