Book Image

Building Cross-Platform GUI Applications with Fyne

By : Andrew Williams
5 (1)
Book Image

Building Cross-Platform GUI Applications with Fyne

5 (1)
By: Andrew Williams

Overview of this book

The history of graphical application development is long and complicated, with various development challenges that persist to this day. The mix of technologies involved and the need to use different programming languages led to a very steep learning curve for developers looking to build applications across multiple platforms. In Building Cross-Platform GUI Applications with Fyne, you'll understand how the Go language, when paired with a modern graphical toolkit such as Fyne, can overcome these issues and make application development much easier. To provide an easy-to-use framework for cross-platform app development, the Fyne project offers many graphical concepts and design principles that are outlined throughout this book. By working through five example projects, you'll learn how to build apps effectively, focusing on each of the main areas, including the canvas, layouts, file handling, widgets, data binding, and themes. The book will also show you how the completed applications can then be run on your desktop computer, laptop, and smartphone. After completing these projects, you will discover how to prepare applications for release and distribute them to platform marketplaces and app stores. By the end of this book, you'll be able to create cross-platform graphical applications with visually appealing user interfaces and concise code.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Why Fyne? The Reason for Being and a Vision of the Future
4
Section 2: Components of a Fyne App
10
Section 3: Packaging and Distribution

Organizing your project

One of the design principles of the Go language is that you can start simple and build more structure into your project as it grows. Following this mantra, you can simply start a GUI project with a single main.go file inside a directory that's been created for the project. This will initially contain your entire application, starting from its main() function.

Starting simple

Once your user interface has grown from the very basics, it is a good idea to split it into a new file, perhaps named ui.go. Splitting the code in this way makes it clearer which code is simply booting an application (the main() function and helpers) compared to what is actually building the user interface.

By this time, you should be thinking about adding unit tests (if you have not already added them!). These tests will live in a file, alongside your code, that ends in _test.go – for example, ui_test.go. It is good practice to test all of your code, and for each new...