What is BLoC architecture?
Flutter BLoC (Business Logic Component) is a powerful state management library for Flutter that has captured the hearts of developers all over the world. The reason for its popularity lies in its ability to simplify complex state management in a clean and organized way.
The BLoC architecture is based on the concept of reactive programming, where the application state is represented as a stream of events. In other words, the BLoC architecture is about managing application state and experiencing changes to that state. The BLoC architecture is made up of three main components:
The Business Logic Component (BLoC): This is where your application’s business logic resides. BLoC receives events from the user interface and processes. It then sends new states to the UI, which updates accordingly.
The user interface (UI): This is the layer that displays your app’s screen to the user. It receives states/events/information from BLoC and updates itself accordingly.
The event flow: This event flow runs from the UI to the BLoC. Represents the user’s interaction with the application.
The main idea behind the BLoC architecture is to separate the business logic from the user interface, which makes the application more modular and easier to maintain. With the BLoC architecture, you can also easily test your application’s business logic in isolation.
A business rule change is easily changed in BLoC, without side effects or bug risks in its UI (View) management layer.
As developers we want to:
- know what state our application is in at any point in time.
- easily test every case to make sure our app is responding appropriately.
- record every single user interaction in our application so that we can make data-driven decisions.
- work as efficiently as possible and reuse components both within our application and across other applications.
- have many developers seamlessly working within a single code base following the same patterns and conventions.
- develop fast and reactive apps.
Bloc was designed to meet all of these needs and many more.
There are many state management solutions and deciding which one to use can be a daunting task. There is no one perfect state management solution! What’s important is that you pick the one that works best for your team and your project.
Bloc was designed with three core values in mind:
- Simple: Easy to understand & can be used by developers with varying skill levels.
- Powerful: Help make amazing, complex applications by composing them of smaller components.
- Testable: Easily test every aspect of an application so that we can iterate with confidence.
Overall, Bloc attempts to make state changes predictable by regulating when a state change can occur and enforcing a single way to change state throughout an entire application.
