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 final chapter, we looked at how to package and distribute Go-based graphical applications. Unlike the distribution of command-line or system utilities, the process of delivering a GUI application requires additional metadata and packaging. Users of graphical apps expect to find and install software in a particular manner that varies based on their operating system. We started by looking at the importance of good metadata and how to select an icon and description that will attract potential users to try out our new software. We then learned how to package assets into our Go-based applications. As the language is designed for single binary distribution, we had to incorporate all supporting files into the executable before distributing. 

Packaging for different platforms can be complicated, so we walked through the steps required to build native-looking graphical packages for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Each package has its own metadata format and package structure but we were...