Cross Platform Development Without JavaScript

#android #ios #beginners #programming

We all know there are cross platform development masters who use languages like JavaScript and CSS to create beautiful mobile apps. If you are like me who has little experience in those areas and does not want to start a full JavaScript course what would you do?

Do not get me wrong -- JavaScript is wonderful and I do have at least little experience with it. The truth is it can really scare someone who is just starting out, there are so many frameworks we have React, Angular, jQuery, Vue, Mercury, Deku, Riot.js 😕...... obama.js, just kidding 😊, but you get what I am saying.

For someone who might want something different let me introduce Flutter to you. Flutter is a new mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android. If you don't have any mobile development experience, Flutter is an easy and fast way to build beautiful mobile apps. If you are an experienced iOS or Android developer, you can use Flutter for your views and leverage much of your existing Java/ObjC/Swift investment.

Also note that with Flutter you can access native features and SDKs on iOS and Android. So you might be asking what programming language Flutter uses, well it uses Dart.

Dart is an application programming language that’s easy to learn, easy to scale, and deployable everywhere. Believe me Dart is really nice, in order for you to have a great experience the IDE I would advice you to use is Intelij IDEA which works great with Dart.

Below is are sample codes using Dart:

// Define a function.
printNumber(num aNumber) {
  print('The number is $aNumber.'); // Print to console.
}

// This is where the app starts executing.
main() {
  var number = 42; // Declare and initialize a variable.
  printNumber(number); // Call a function.
}

class Point {
  num x;
  num y;

  // Syntactic sugar for setting x and y
  // before the constructor body runs.
  Point(this.x, this.y);
}

I think the code is self explanatory, it's very similar to Java and also other languages.

You can check the Flutter website to check it out, also the installation is straight forward, it will be wise to also checkout Dart which is what you will be using and there are codelabs for you to try it out, if you have any issue you can always contact me.

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