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 14. Distributing Your Application

By now, you should be familiar with how to build graphical user interfaces for applications using the Go language. The last step of any journey in building a graphical application is distribution. The process of packaging and releasing your completed product can be challenging, especially if you are publishing to multiple platforms, and we will explore these details in this chapter.

While the Go language and the libraries that we've utilized so far in this book make it easy to write software for multiple platforms, there is no escaping the fact that different operating systems require native graphical applications to be in different formats. For developers, it is often easy to forget this, as Go tools build from the source code in a way that's consistent across different systems. To prepare an application for release, we will look at the following topics:

  • Preparing metadata and icons for our application
  • Bundling assets to fit with Go's single binary...