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

Summary


In this chapter, we looked at the second toolkit of three that were designed to break away from the traditional toolkits that we looked at in Section 2, Toolkits Using Existing Widgets. The Nuklear project primarily targets embedded applications but we saw that, in many ways, it's a possible fit for desktop applications. Its bespoke widget design means that applications will look identical across all supported operating systems, which is a longer list than Shiny—including Android for mobile development.

We explored how the Nuklear framework is designed and how it interacts with various backends that provide the actual drawing and user input implementation. We examined the main API features, including its drawing capabilities, the widgets it includes, and the layout algorithms that it provides for constructing user interfaces. We then implemented the same GoMail project that was created in Chapter 4Walk - Building Graphical Windows Applications, through to Chapter 7, Go-Qt - Multiple...