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

Qt background


The Qt framework was created in 1991 by a company named Trolltech (now called the Qt Company). The KDE Linux desktop is based on Qt and its increase in popularity may be a key reason why Qt development became more widespread. As a platform that's, in part, aimed at embedded devices, the typical developers using Qt are different to those for the GTK+ framework. Additionally, the tooling and support available is better developed due to their commercial backing.

The Qt framework is released in two separate distributions, one commercial and one open source (known as dual licensing). In this manner, they can support open source-compliant applications for free, while providing unrestricted usage for closed source commercial projects. Before the year 2000 (with the release of 2.2), the source code for the free distribution had been under various licenses that some groups considered incompatible with common open source initiatives. For the 2.2 release, it was changed to GPL licensing...