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

Summary


In this chapter, we explored the details of the GTK+ toolkit and how it is made available to Go through go-GTK. We looked at how to get it set up on macOS, Windows, and Linux and how the applications look and behave exactly the same across these platforms. We explored the API design, its various components, and how its event driven model is exposed to developers.

We then returned to the GoMail application from Chapter 4Walk - Building Graphical Windows Applications, and Chapter 5, andlabs UI - Cross-Platform Native UIs, rebuilding it using the Go-GTK library. As the API provides access to most GTK+ features, we found that the application looks more complete than the GTK+ based application created by the Linux driver within andlabs UI used in Chapter 5, andlabs UI - Cross-Platform Native UIs. We implemented some basic thread and signal handling within the application to handle user input and background events. Lastly, we explored how the powerful GTK+ theme engine could style the...