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

Chapter 1: A Brief History of GUI Toolkits and Cross-Platform Development

This book is aimed at exploring how to easily build robust and beautiful graphical applications that will work well across all operating systems and devices. Before we start looking at the details of how this is accomplished, it is important to consider the history of these devices and the landscape of graphical toolkits throughout the last 50 years. We start with a reminder of where GUI-based applications started and how far they have come.

In this chapter, you will be reintroduced to the Graphical User Interface (GUI), along with learning about toolkits that support app development and how they offer different approaches to cross-platform development. We will explore the benefits of coding a native GUI for responsive user experience and platform integration. Upon completion of this chapter, you should be familiar with the origins and challenges of graphical toolkits and the different approaches that have been taken during this journey.

In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics to provide a short history of GUI toolkits and cross-platform development:

  • Where GUI toolkits came from
  • How they have adapted (or stayed the same) over time
  • Historical approaches to cross-platform development