Description: Discoveries in Swift and iOS development! By Craig Grummitt
In the previous article in this series , we looked at my first impressions of Flutter , Google’s increasingly popular multiple-platform development tool. Flutter has me quite impressed, but I am curious to know – How easy is it to bring in third party dependencies for multiple platforms?
In my experience working in mobile development, third party dependencies are brought in via platform specific dependency managers – CocoaPods for example in iOS, or the Gradle build system in Android. How can Flutter manage third party dependencies, and make them available for multiple platforms? Well, it turns out that Dart has its own dependency manager, called the Pub package manager.
When you create a Flutter project, you will find a file called pubspec.yaml is automatically generated in the root folder. This file contains a few basic preference details, such as the package name , description , version number for your application and environment where you can specify the version numbers of the Dart and Flutter SDKs we are expecting our code to use to compile. There is also a section called flutter , where you can specify image assets to include in your app, or custom fonts.