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 popular Qt toolkit, its history, and how we can use it to build attractive graphical applications with Go. We saw how easy it is to create a GUI that works identically across many supported platforms. 

Through exploring our GoMail application, we found how the powerful layout and built-in standard icons help to quickly build an attractive user interface. The tools provided as part of therecipe's qt bindings allowed us to create custom signals to handle our background processing and avoid multi-threading issues. We'll look further into the distribution of these Go apps for multiple operating systems in Chapter 14, Distributing Your Application.

In Section 3, Modern Graphical Toolkits, we leave behind the familiar toolkits that make use of standard widget sets. We'll look at various widget toolkits that have either been designed from scratch for cross-platform delivery or to be a great match for the Go programming language.