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

Getting started with Shiny


In keeping with the design of Shiny to not depend on any native libraries or system dependencies, there are no prerequisites to using it. So, we can jump straight into getting the library installed and see it in action.

Setup

Installing the Shiny library is as simple as installing the Go files from golang.org/x/exp/shiny and its x/mobile and x/image dependencies. As these are top-level projects, you may see a warning about no Go files—you can ignore this, as the APIs will be installed:

Getting x/exp/shiny will download the package contents

No extra libraries or system configuration are required.

Example

Before we start building an application, let's load an example project to check that Shiny is installed and working correctly. The project provides various example projects—we will check the one called basic. Simply change to the examples/basic directory and run main.go:

Launching the basic Shiny example

After launching, you should see the following window and (as illustrated...