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 chapter, we looked at our first modern widget toolkit, Shiny, which has been designed specifically for the Go language. We explored its design principles and how it manages to support cross-platform graphical application development without the need for external dependencies. We also saw that its design makes use of powerful features of the Go language, such as concurrency and the standard library.

The graphical design principles behind Shiny provide a new interpretation of the desktop application GUI, which will be familiar to users of the Android mobile operating system (due to them using the same material design approach). While exploring its graphical capabilities, we saw that the widget set is currently in its early stages and so isn't yet ready to support the GoMail application we've been creating in previous chapters. To explore the capabilities of the Shiny toolkit, we instead developed an image viewer application, which is better suited to the current feature set...