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


Now that we've looked at the API capabilities of andlabs UI, let's look at building a graphical application of some complexity. For this section, we will follow the design of the "GoMail" application introduced in the Chapter 4, Walk - Building Graphical Windows Applications. The design presented was created using the Qt Creator tool which, while being a good fit for developing applications with the Walk library, is not a direct fit for all GUI toolkits. The multiple-platform approach of andlabs UI to use the native widgets means that some components are not available, but some can be created by combining simple widgets to form more complex components.

With that in mind, let's have a quick look at how the different platforms' styling capabilities may affect the application we are building. After exploring styles, we will start implementing the basic layout of our application and add the controls and features to demonstrate the user interface capabilities.

Style

The...