What Is GetX?

Background

Flutter is a popular open-source UI toolkit created by Google. It is designed to build natively compiled mobile, web, and desktop applications from a single codebase. Launched in 2017, Flutter has gained significant traction in the developer community due to its unique capabilities and efficient development workflow.

Flutter emerged to address key challenges developers face in traditional mobile app development, especially with UI design and performance optimization. One of the primary problems it aimed to solve was the need for a unified framework that could produce visually appealing and responsive interfaces across different platforms without sacrificing performance or requiring separate codebases for iOS and Android apps.

Key features of Flutter include its expressive and flexible UI framework, known as widgets, which enable developers to create rich, custom interfaces using a comprehensive library of prebuilt components. Flutter’s hot reload feature allows for rapid iteration and experimentation, significantly speeding up the development process. Moreover, Flutter’s high-performance rendering engine ensures smooth animations and transitions, making it ideal for creating fluid user experiences across various devices and screen sizes.

However, certain aspects of Flutter are lengthy, have a steep learning curve, or are tedious to deal with. A quick example would be the Navigator 2.0 API, which requires much effort to learn and implement. Even with state management, most packages require us to write boilerplate code or simply lack features. These areas have a good scope for improvement; this is where GetX comes into the picture.

GetX and its ecosystem

GetX is a micro-framework for Flutter that aims to improve the developer experience by providing solutions for various app development aspects. This feature-rich package seamlessly combines state management, dependency injection, and route management solutions. Many utilities come out of the box to help with networking, theming, responsiveness, etc.

Complementing this, several other packages and tools exist in the GetX suite. First, we have GetStorage, which provides synchronous local storage across all platforms. There’s Get CLI that automates project structure and boilerplate. Finally, GetX Snippets help us with code completion.

These tools nicely integrate to form something that we call the GetX ecosystem.

What makes GetX special?

Sure, the package is massive considering the sheer number of features, but what sets GetX apart are the following points:

• Simplified syntax: GetX syntax is simple, short, and neat. For example, navigating to a page is as simple as writing Get.to(SomePage()). Easily share dependencies using Get.find(). Or change the app’s theme with Get.changeTheme().

• Practical approach: Working with GetX is quite a satisfying experience. We don’t have to write any boilerplate or deal with code generators. Everything feels practical and self-evident.

• 100% decoupling: Business logic is separated from views, and dependencies can be organized separately using bindings. That’s how powerful it gets!

• Reliability: GetX centralizes most of our development needs under one package, so we don’t have to worry about maintenance or compatibility issues. We can add get as a dependency and start developing the app immediately.

• Minimal learning curve: Because of a high level of abstraction, starting with GetX is super easy. It’s one of the best ways to learn concepts like state management and dependency injection if you’re a beginner in Flutter.