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

Building a user interface


To explore the capabilities of the Shiny toolkit, we will build another complete graphical application. As the development of Shiny has been focused on the lower layer of graphical APIs, an application such as GoMail would involve the creation of many custom widgets. Instead, we will look at a more graphically-oriented application—an image viewer.

Design

To get an idea of how the image viewer should look, we will make a rough design that we can follow. The online tool Balsamiq (balsamiq.com) is a good way to rapidly create wireframes that will suit this purpose. Take a look at the following export. It includes a navigation bar along the top, a directory listing on the left, and a full-size image view on the right:

A mockup of the GoImages application using the Balsamiq tool

Clearly, this image has a far lower level of detail than the design tool we used in Chapter 4Walk – Building Graphical Windows Applications (back at the beginning of Section 2, Toolkits Using Existing...