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

Consistent user experience when offline


In modern graphical applications, a good user experience is clearly dependent upon great design and a high level of quality, but it's also important to handle network and service failures. In the Network resources and caching section of this chapter, we covered, caching of server responses to be more fault tolerant and to speed up application loading, but that's a small portion of a larger strategy for great offline support.

Caching responses

The response caching code introduced earlier in this chapter can be applied to almost all HTTP requests, but we only used it for HTTP GET. Of the many different types of HTTP requests, only three are deemed to be cacheable (GET, HEAD, and POST), and the HEAD request doesn't return a body and so isn't useful in our application. The POST method is indicative of an action being performed, so in our context (and most others), it's more important to know that it completed, rather than to save the response it caused ...