Book Image

Hands-On GUI Application Development in Go

By : Andrew Williams
Book Image

Hands-On GUI Application Development in Go

By: Andrew Williams

Overview of this book

Go is often compared to C++ when it comes to low-level programming and implementations that require faster processing, such as Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). In fact, many claim that Go is superior to C++ in terms of its concurrency and ease of use. Most graphical application toolkits, though, are still written using C or C++, and so they don't enjoy the benefits of using a modern programming language such as Go. This guide to programming GUIs with Go 1.11 explores the various toolkits available, including UI, Walk, Shiny, and Fyne. The book compares the vision behind each project to help you pick the right approach for your project. Each framework is described in detail, outlining how you can build performant applications that users will love. To aid you further in creating applications using these emerging technologies, you'll be able to easily refer to code samples and screenshots featured in the book. In addition to toolkit-specific discussions, you'll cover more complex topics, such as how to structure growing graphical applications, and how cross-platform applications can integrate with each desktop operating system to create a seamless user experience. By delving into techniques and best practices for organizing and scaling Go-based graphical applications, you'll also glimpse Go's impressive concurrency system. In the concluding chapters, you'll discover how to distribute to the main desktop marketplaces and distribution channels. By the end of this book, you'll be a confident GUI developer who can use the Go language to boost the performance of your applications.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Comparison of GUI Toolkits
Index

Planning application layout


Planning a large graphical application can seem like a daunting task, if you're thinking about all of the different users of your software and the varied devices it'll be used on. Or, it may seem quite straightforward if your ambitions can be realized by using standard design applications (such as Qt Creator or Glade for GTK+) that can generate code from a drag-and-drop interface. Unsurprisingly, creating a great user experience for your application interface will probably take a while to explore, plan, and design for the best result. The largest complexity is likely the navigation or overall layout of the application—we'll look first at layout techniques across multiple platforms.

Standard layouts

Each of the toolkits we've explored provide standard layout components that help to organize widgets and interface elements in neat, standardized arrangements. When you think about the naming of these layouts, however (for example, VBox, Border, and Frame), they typically...