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

Bundling assets


Go applications are designed to run from a single binary file. This means they can be easily distributed and do not rely on installation scripts. Unfortunately, this benefit results in a cost for developers—we cannot rely on resources being found next to our applications in the way that web or mobile app developers can (as we have been doing during development). To ensure that our applications conform to this design, we must embed any required assets into the application binary. This includes fonts, images, and any other static content that's needed for the application to operate correctly.

go-bindata

GUI-based applications are not alone in needing to solve this challenge so there are many solutions already available. The most commonly utilized tool is called go-bindata and is available from github.com/jteeuwen/go-bindata. It is a simple utility that converts static files in to Go source code so they can be compiled into an application. This approach is the easiest to work...