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

Building a user interface


Armed with the knowledge of how the Walk API is designed and utilized, let's move on to a real-world example. In this book, we will be building the same user interface for each toolkit explored (in Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10), which will be a simple email application named GoMail. Due to the close relationship between Walk and Qt widgets, we can quickly get started designing the user interface using the UI Builder included in Qt Creator (documentation is available at http://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/creator-using-qt-designer.html).

The basic application will be formed of two windows: the main email browser and a secondary window for composing new emails. The main window will contain a list or tree view that shows the emails we have received, a larger panel to display the content of the currently-selected email, and a menu and toolbar for accessing the various features of our email application:

The main email window within Qt Designer

To compose new emails, we will...