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

Continuous integration for GUIs


Continuous integration (the regular merging of a team's work-in-progress code to be automatically tested) has become commonplace in software-development teams. Adding this process to your team workflow is shown to highlight issues earlier in the development process, which leads to fixing issues faster and, ultimately, better-quality software. A critical part of this is the automation of tests that exercise the whole of the source code, which includes the graphical user interface.

Approaches to GUI test automation

It is important to organize your code into logical components for development and testing. Using the framework test features (or external support libraries) smaller components can more easily be verified through simple tests. The Go language's built-in support for testing has meant that test coverage is improving; in fact, the popular Go library list, awesome-go.com, asks that libraries have a test coverage of at least 80%! GUI toolkits, especially...