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

Chapter 13. Best Practices in Go GUI Development

The Go language has well-defined practices for formatting, documentation, and code structure. You can find these referenced in many places, for example, https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#formatting and https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/CodeReviewComments. Additionally, there is a strong community drive to encourage writing idiomatic Go, such as https://dmitri.shuralyov.com/idiomatic-go. Many of these design decisions are encoded in tools such as gofmt and golint, which makes it easy for people to learn and maintain standardized code.

In this chapter, we will look beyond these code standards and common conventions to focus on the aspects of best practice that make it easier to maintain and grow GUI-based applications. We will cover the following topics:

  • Separation of concerns
  • Test-driving UI development
  • Continuous integration for GUIs
  • Managing platform specifics

The addition of graphical elements to an application often makes it harder to...