How To Code & Develop A 5 Screen Application Using Our Flutter Framework

Greetings to all budding developers out there! Today, we will walk you through the step-by-step process of coding and developing a 5 screen application using the most in-demand cross-platform – Flutter. Heralded as the future of development for mobile, web, and desktop, Flutter has been making programming simpler, faster, and more fascinating.

Let’s first understand what Flutter is. Flutter is Google’s UI toolkit for crafting beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. The holy grail of Flutter framework is that it allows developers to write code once and deploy it on multiple platforms, all while retaining the app’s native performance.

Let’s dive into the procedural steps of creating a 5-screen application using Flutter.

Step 1: Installing the SDK

Before you kick start, you need to have Flutter SDK installed in your system. If you haven’t installed it yet, just navigate to the Flutter website and follow the detailed instructions according to your OS (Windows, macOS, Linux).

Step 2: Setting up the Project

Upon Flutter’s successful installation, you can access the Flutter command globally. Use the below command for creating a new project:

flutter create your_project_name

Step 3: Defining The Main Function

Upon successfully creating a new project, open the folder, navigate to lib/main.dart – this is the main entry point of our application. The ‘void main’ function inside this is where our app begins its execution.

Step 4: Creating the UI Screens

Now let’s start creating different screens for our application. To do this, we will create 5 different dart files; each will represent a screen in the Flutter project ‘lib’ directory. Every page will comprise a Scaffold widget, having an AppBar and the body.

Class Screen1 extends StatelessWidget{
  @override
  Widget build (BuildContext context){
    return Scaffold(
      appBar: AppBar(
        title: Text('Screen 1'),
       ),
      body: Center(...)
...

Replicate this for all your anticipated screens (Screen2, Screen3, etc.).

Step 5: Navigation

The next important thing is to establish navigation between screens. Flutter allows navigation using ‘Navigator’ class which stacks up the routes/screens. You can use ‘push’ for moving to the next screen and ‘pop’ for returning to the previous screen. Define a button in each screen to navigate to the next screen:

MaterialButton(
  child: Text('Go to screen 2'),
  onPressed: () {
    Navigator.push(context, 
     MaterialPageRoute(builder: 
      (context) => Screen2()),);
  },
);

Repeat for all the screens and for the last screen, instead of ‘push’, use ‘pop’ to return to the first screen:

MaterialButton(
  child: Text('Go to screen 1'),
  onPressed: () {
    Navigator.popUntil(context, 
    ModalRoute.withName(Navigator.defaultRouteName));
  },
);

You’ve created an application

Remember, Flutter is all about widgets. Everything you stitch together – from button to toolbar to screen layouts – are widgets. The genius of Flutter framework is not in just its language(Dart), but also in its powerful concept of widget tree, creating a hierarchy of widgets.

Happy Fluttering!