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

Web services and cloud integration


Web services and online functionality is a core part of most applications today. Whether you are working with data downloaded from a central source, collaborating on documents stored online, or just looking to share your creation, this will probably be done via the internet. The core of most graphical toolkits and APIs are focused solely on the widgets—the presentation of the interface to the user. While this is due to various different reasons (and is evolving and expanding over time), it mostly reflects the period when they were created. Programming languages such as C and C++ underpin many of the native graphical toolkits (especially those targeting multiple platforms), and they pre-date cloud services and web-based APIs as we know them today. Powerful web services and standardized protocols for communications vastly improve the speed of development for web-based applications. Conversely, they can make it harder for native graphical applications on the...