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

Designing APIs for simplicity and maintainability

A delightful user experience is an important ambition for any application toolkit, but Fyne aims to make the experience of development a pleasure as well. To do this, the API must be planned carefully to be simple and easy to learn, but also extensible to support more complex applications. The project’s modular approach aims to support this while also being testable every step of the way.

Semantic API

An API (or Application Programming Interface) is typically defined as a set of functions and procedures that controls access to features and data. At a high level, however, the Fyne toolkit aims to deliver a semantic API, a set of functions that defines intent rather than features or functionality. By taking this approach, the toolkit is able to separate meaning from presentation.

For example, we can consider a simple button—when there are many on a screen, you may wish for one to stand out against the other as more...