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

Binding complex data types

The types that we have used in our data binding exploration so far have been limited to mappings of the Go primitive types. This means that they represent simple variables with a single element. For many applications, it will be necessary to display more complex data, such as lists, maps, or even custom structs. In this section, we will look at how that can be done, starting with the DataList type.

Using lists of data

Whether you wish to use data bindings to present data to a widget.List or a widget.RadioGroup, or if you are modeling your data with bindings that will be passed to your own widgets, the concept of a data list will be important. The data binding API defines DataList as a binding that provides additional Length and GetItem(int) functions, as follows:

type DataList interface {
    DataItem
    GetItem(int) DataItem
    Length() int
}

This generic definition means that a list...