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

Test-driving UI development


The effort required to automatically test user interfaces or frontend software is often debated as being far too expensive for the value it returns in avoiding future bugs. However, this is largely rooted in the toolkits being utilized or even the presentation technologies chosen. Without full support for testing in the development tools or graphical APIs, it can indeed be difficult to create simple unit tests without a huge effort. As seen frequently in web-based environments (and some native test frameworks), the only remaining possibility is to run the application and execute test scripts that will perform the validation. They will typically control the user input, simulating mouse actions and keyboard taps, and monitor the resulting behavior of the application under test. If, however, your application and GUI toolkit are architected with testing in mind (for example, using separation of concerns), automated tests should be possible with far less overhead.

Designed...