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

Test driving your development

The effort required to automatically test user interfaces or frontend software is often considered too expensive for the value it returns when it comes to avoiding future bugs. However, this is largely rooted in the toolkits being utilized or even the presentation technologies that have been chosen. Without full support for testing in the development tools or graphical APIs, it can be difficult to create simple unit tests without a huge amount of effort being needed.

One of the design principles of the Fyne toolkit is that the application GUI should be as easy to test as the rest of its code. This is partly made possible by the API's design, but this is further reinforced by the test utilities that we can provision. We will explore this later in this section. Using the following approaches, we will learn how a Fyne application can follow test-driven development (TDD), even for the user interface components.

Designed to be tested

The modular...