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

Building a user interface


Let's return to our GoMail application again to try out the nk API. Nuklear is an established toolkit with a lot of functionality so it should be able to build the user interface just as well as previous examples. What we'll see as we build out this user interface is how different an immediate mode toolkit is, in how the code is arranged and how event handling is managed.

We can start by copying the hello world application so we don't have to re-work all of the setup code and life cycle management. As this application is going to contain many more graphical elements, we need to increase the buffer sizes that set using NkPlatformRender(). Replace the original line with the following for this example. In your own applications, this may need to be higher still—if the number is too low, you may notice graphical elements not showing or disappearing when popups and menu items appear:

nk.NkPlatformRender(nk.AntiAliasingOn, 512 * 1024, 128 * 1024)

Layout

We'll begin with the...