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

Sample application


It's time to dust off the GoMail application design again and adapt it for GTK+ widgets. As the andlabs UI application (when run on Linux) was using GTK+, it would seem logical to start from there. However, this time we are not limited by the lowest common denominator design constraint, which the native cross-platform design of andlabs worked around, so let's start from scratch and see what GTK+ can do.

Layout

Basic layout with GTK+-based applications uses a familiar vertical and horizontal box model. Go-GTK (as a straightforward binding to this API) exposes this same functionality. We lay out the GoMail main window using a vertical box to position the menu and toolbar above the main content. Our main content is then a horizontally split pane created with gtk.NewHPaned() (where H refers to the horizontal layout, not the bar orientation, which is vertical). Before looking at the details, here's the basic layout code for the main window. The toolbar and menu creation code...