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

Summary


In this chapter, we explored andlabs UI toolkit, which provides a single API to build graphical Go applications using the native widgets of the running operating system. We stepped through getting set up to build an andlabs UI application on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and showed how a simple hello world application could be run on each system from a single Go source file. We then looked in detail at the widget API for building applications and the drawing APIs for custom rendering.

With this knowledge, we revisited the GoMail application from ???Chapter 4Walk - Building Graphical Windows Applications, and built the user interface again using andlabs UI library. While there were some limitations with the current version, we were able to simulate some of the missing widgets to almost completely recreate the application. The benefit, of course, is that we could then run the GUI on Windows, Linux, and macOS from the same source code.

Testing an application built with a library where...