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

Theming


The Qt theme (known as Style in Qt terminology) can be adjusted similarly to GTK apps in the previous chapter. Before Qt 5, the current theme could be configured using a standard setup application but in Qt 5, the aim was to fit in with the current desktop—therefore, the application style will adapt to blend in. It's possible to override these settings on a per-application basis. As our application passes the command-line parameters in our QApplication constructor (widgets.NewQApplication(len(os.Args), os.Args)), we inherit some helpful options, such as -style=OtherStyle.

Another default parameter that can be very powerful for applications is -reverse. This option will tell all layouts to work in a right-to-left orientation instead of the default left to right:

GoMail with reversed layout