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

Widgets and material design


Before we can start a simple application, we need to understand more about Shiny widgets and how their visual design impacts development. The other toolkits that we've looked at didn't need this understanding to start using the API, but the experimental status of the higher-level APIs in Shiny means that even a hello world application requires some understanding of how the toolkit functions.

Before we get into the details of the widgets that Shiny provides and how to work with them, let's take a look at the design and iconography of the Shiny project. This design takes a different approach to the toolkits we've previously looked at in this book, but it should be familiar to any Android app developers or users of the Google product suite.

Design

Material design, if you are not already familiar with the concept, can be defined as follows:

... an adaptable system of guidelines, components, and tools that support the best practices of user interface design"          ...