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

Chapter 3. Go to the Rescue!

Having read the previous chapter on the challenges of building native graphical applications, you may be wondering whether it's worth all the effort. Hopefully, you are confident that your users will appreciate the quality user experience you are designing, and your team will be keen to see the benefits of taking this route over a web app or other approach. Thankfully, the team at Google that designed the Go programming language understood these challenges and decided that something should be done to aid developers in their quest!

In this chapter, we will take a detailed look at the Go language and see how its design can solve (or help with) the various challenges discussed in Chapter 2, Graphical User Interface Challenges. In particular, we will look at the following topics:

  • A cross-platform approach for any applications
  • How the concurrency model helps create reliable applications
  • Built-in support for working with web services
  • Choosing the look and feel of your GUI...