An Introduction to Flutter Markup Language
Built on top of Google’s Flutter, Flutter Markup Language simplifies the process of building beautiful, data driven, applications on all platforms and devices, with real time (non-compiled) interpretation.
Flutter markup language (FML) was originally developed to be utilized by individuals and internal IT teams with little to no coding background. As it evolved, it was expanded to be a powerful tool for even the most seasoned software engineer. Through its evolution, FML has been built to satisfy the following concepts without sacrificing its ease of use:
- The ability to create, modify, and easily understand cross platform applications for both developers and those with no programming background.
- The ease-of-use of having a single project and unified language that deploys across multiple devices and platforms. Eliminating the need of managing multiple codebases and repeatedly preforming the same changes.
- The ability to provide on-demand real time updates to live applications without the need to re-compile and update devices individually.
- The flexibility of linking into both new and existing databases to unify old applications and create new functionality from existing data, without the need to rewrite complex systems.
- Performant applications that can handle large quantities of unknown data dynamically, which could only be achieved previously using native language features.
- Finally, FML must provide a “no holds barred” approach to ensuring all tools needed to develop modern applications are included and easily useable.
and thus, through a lot of live trial and error, multiple extensive use cases, and thousands of hours of development: Flutter Markup Language was born.
A few concepts to better understand FML:
- FML uses XML to define the syntactical structure of the language.
- A “Template” is the individual language .xml documents that make up a project. The Template can represent a whole page, a part of a page, or multiple pages in a single navigation element.
- A “Widget” is the FML element that denotes a functional piece of a template. Everything in FML is built of widgets and their respective “attributes”.
- “Databinding” is the syntax that we use to access data from other widgets. These can include network calls, local storage, device hardware, and UI widgets themselves.
- The “engine” is the interpreter that compiles natively and allows for real-time processing of templates. The engine is installed by the user via desktop and mobile platforms, and loaded into the browser with web applications.
With that in mind, what is FML really?
Flutter Markup Language is a real-time interpreted framework developed to rapidly build and deploy modern applications across all platforms. FML is Free-to-Use and Fair-Source Licensed. Visit the Github for more details. It greatly simplifies the process of building applications, both single and cross platform, with no coding background needed.
Offering both offline and online capabilities, FML users can easily build an application from the ground up, link into existing databases, as well as unify multiple databases spread across separate applications with a single, simple, suite.
FML is real-time interpreted, which means updates to individual pages or entire applications can be completed by the developer without the need for new project compilation, downloading updates, or installing new applications. Single pages can be altered with ease and changes, bug fixes, and updates can be made in real time as users request them.
Coding multiple projects for multiple platforms is becoming a thing of the past. FML leveraged Google’s Flutter to allow for users to create a single project that can deploy on any platform. This building block also means native compilation for the engine, well designed libraries, endless device and platform support, as well as the power and syntactical sugar of Dart.
Using all of these concepts, FML is able to build applications on any platform that is supported by Flutter, offering native-level performance and no-compile application updates in real time.
Flutter Markup Language can be used to develop applications for small businesses, personal projects, and rapid prototypes, with the ability to easily scale to industrial, fintech, and lab management applications to name a few.
In fact, applications written in FML are actively being used in companies on a global scale, such as Goodyear Rubber and Tire inc. to provide real time data, results, and machine statuses between production and experimental plants.
For more detailed information on the applications, current userbase, GitHub repo, as well as deep dives into documentation and sample apps, you can visit the official page of Flutter Markup Language.
So how can I try it out?
Flutter Markup Language is currently in public beta. The source code can be cloned on our Github Repo. Documentation and information surrounding FML though in-progress can be accessed via fml.dev.
For information regarding FML, the developers can be contacted at isaac@appdaddy.co, through our discord server, or by signing up via our mailing list on the fml.dev home page.
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You can also check out our developer talking about some of the use cases and origins of Flutter Markup Language on the Flying High With Flutter podcast!
