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

Summary


In this chapter, we explored some of the more complex aspects of developing a rich application with long-running background threads and a reliance on remote resources or web services. We first looked at multi-threading and the management of long-running processes, building on the basics of goroutines and thread handling from earlier chapters. We looked at how background processes can be designed to minimize the impact of the code overhead required by some graphical toolkits.

Most of the complexity discussed in this chapter covered working with remote resources and web services. We saw how to implement caching strategies and how they can work to create a more resilient application when network conditions aren't optimal. We also explored authentication of requests (using the common OAuth2 workflow) and connected the GoMail examples to a live Gmail account to read and send emails.

All of these topics help to build robustness into an application and maintain a high quality user experience...