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

Background and the vision for Shiny


The Shiny project was created in an effort to understand how a graphical application toolkit could be created to be in keeping with the Go idiom. Therefore, it is important that its API and methodologies should match the Go language semantics and standard library, its dependencies should be only pure Go libraries or existing system routines, and it should provide a modern approach to developing an application GUI. Much of this is only possible if you start from scratch, as you can tell from the toolkit bindings we saw in Section 2, Toolkits Using Existing Widgets of this book. It lives in the golang.org/x/exp/shiny repository—an experimental extension to the Go libraries.

The project was started as an investigation by Nigel Tao, a Go developer who had been working on golang.org/x/mobile (on which Shiny depends), as he wanted to see desktop applications supported by a new API. After substantial development, it was proposed that this be added as an experimental...