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

Canvas, widgets, and layouts


The Fyne API is divided into various sub-packages for basic drawing definition, container layout, high-level widgets, and theme description. In this section, we will look at each in turn. These packages provide the implementation details that are useful from an application developer point of view, and they typically implement generic interfaces. These interface definitions are at the top level of the hierarchy and include things such as fyne.CanvasObject (which is implemented by any object that can be added to a canvas), fyne.Container (that describes how multiple objects can be grouped and laid out), and fyne.Resource (representing an embedded application resource, such as an icon or font). Additionally, there are some math and geometry utilities as well as definitions for event and text handling.

There are additional packages that we will not cover, including dialog (helpful classes for common dialog windows), driver (which is where drivers are loaded from)...