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

Background and aims


The Walk project is one of the oldest GUI toolkits for Go, having been started in September of 2010. The name stands for Windows Application Library Kit, which reflects its purpose to support building GUI apps for the Microsoft platform. Its project home is on GitHub, where you can check out the latest developments and discussions: https://github.com/lxn/walk.

 

 

The project API was inspired by the Qt Widgets module for the Qt framework (which will be covered in Chapter 7Go-Qt - Multiple Platforms with QT). Qt Widgets is a selection of standard user interface features for creating graphical applications with a familiar look and feel. By matching the Qt design closely, it's possible to use some of the Qt tools, such as UI designer, when preparing a Walk-based user interface for your application. Walk currently supports the most commonly-utilized widgets, which means it may not be suitable for every application. At the time of writing, the Multi Document Interface (MDI...