This chapter covers
- Serializing JSON data
- Using HTTP to talk to a backend
- Using Firebase as a backend
- Using a Firestore NoSQL database
- Using dependency injection for reusable code
At this point in the book, if you’ve been following along in order, you’re ready to build a full, production-ready frontend in Flutter. Truly, you’re finished! If you work at a company that’s considering building a Flutter app, you have all the information you need to start that project or to convince your manager it’s worth it.
But there are an infinite number of topics that, although similar in Flutter to various other SDKs, are pertinent in writing applications. For the rest of the book, I’m going to depart from a Flutter focus on topics you need to leverage in any mobile app. Particularly in the app we’re going to build in this chapter, you probably want to know how to work with a backend or data store. And to talk to almost any backend, you’ll probably want to turn Dart objects into some universal data format, like JSON. That’s what this chapter is about: talking to backends.
With that in mind, the UI work for the remainder of the book is light. In fact, the app that I’m going to make in this chapter looks like the one shown in figure 10.1.
