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, layout, and skinning


As the Nuklear library focuses purely on the widget aspects of an application toolkit, its capability in this area is comparable to that of more established application libraries. As you'll see in the following, there's a long list of widgets that can be included in any Nuklear application. As the nk bindings expose all of the library functionality, these features are all available to an nk application as well.

The GUI functionality is split into three broad areas: widgets (the main user interface elements), drawing (for drawing directly to the canvas), and layout (for arranging elements on screen). In this section, we'll look at each area in turn, starting with the main widgets.

Widgets

The Nuklear widgets (and the nk API presenting them) should in many ways be familiar. Sensible naming allows for many of these features to be discovered while programming in your favorite IDE, but let's explore the main widgets and how they function:

Widget name

Description

NkButtonLabel...