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

Choosing your look and feel


As discussed in Chapter 2Graphical User Interface Challenges, there are many approaches to graphical applications, leaving developers to choose between native versus hybrid (packaged web apps) and designers to pick from system look and feel, a multi-platform widget set, or even a custom design. The choice you make will probably be impacted by the needs of your application and the platforms you aim to target—is performance important and do you aim for a cross-platform deployment? Go doesn't have a standard graphical toolkit, and this omission has led developers to think it's not a language to be used for coding GUI applications. However, as we've seen in this chapter, it's a great fit for graphical application development. This leads to the question: which toolkits are available to build GUI apps in Go?

Simply put: a lot. You can see a list of the major, currently-maintained toolkits online at https://awesome-go.com/#gui—there is probably an option that suits...