The Art of Flutter: Widget Explained

The Art of Flutter: Widget Explained

The Art of Flutter

The Art of Flutter is a beginner-friendly Medium series illustrating different key topics and insights about Flutter and Dart. This series will also introduce Firebase, a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform as part of the Google Cloud Platform and how to use Flutter with Firebase using Golang for Firebase Cloud Functions in production at scale.

Widget Explained

What is exactly a widget in Flutter?

As Flutter is a declarative User Interface (UI) framework, Flutter uses Skia, a 2D graphics rendering library to paint a user interface object on your Android, iOS, desktop, and web device screens. This object is called a Widget.

In a web browser, a widget represents an HTML element which comprises of many CSS styles and JavaScript functions to render the desired styles and interactions on the element.

In a mobile app, a widget represents a UI component from Material Design running on an Android device and it represents UIKit component running on an iOS device.

Similarly, in a desktop app, a widget represents a UI component from AppKit running on a macOS device, a UWP component running on a Windows device, and a GTK+ component running on a Linux device.