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

Developing for multiple platforms


Beyond the challenges described earlier in this chapter, graphical applications face additional complications when targeting multi-platform distributions. Dependency and package management are out of scope for this section as they affect system and web applications in broadly the same way, although system applications rarely have to handle packaged resources (such as images and design elements) and web applications are unlikely to publish binary packages. Outlined in this section are the main challenges that are unique to, or harder for, GUI-based applications planning a cross-platform strategy.  While each of these can be overcome, they typically introduce additional development overheads that should be taken into consideration when designing your application.

Cross-platform APIs

When designing for multiple platforms the first consideration is probably the look and feel (see the Standard look and feel or app theme at the beginning of this chapter). However...