What You'll Learn
- How to work with the Fyne Canvas
- How to work with Fyne Windows
- How to use (and customize) Widgets, including dialogs, text, labels, input fields, forms, and tables
- How to validate user input
- How to fetch external resources from remote servers and use them in our application
- How to use containers to arrange things in a window
- How to embed a sqlite database into a desktop application
- How to build custom menu items and link them to actions
- How to read and write files from your application
- How to read and write preferences
- How to bundle assets (e.g. images) into a Fyne application
- How to build a single binary with a custom icon
- How to sign a Mac OS X application for distribution
Who is this for
- Developers who know Go, and want to learn how to build a GUI application.
Requirements
- Familiarity with the Go programming language.
- Mac or Windows computer and an Internet connection.
Description
Many developers are intimidated by the idea of writing a desktop application, and this is probably because of the rise of web based applications. In fact, some university computer science programs do not even devote an entire course to developing GUI applications, and that's unfortunate.
Go, sometimes referred as Golang, has quickly risen in popularity over the past decade, and has become extremely popular for building REST APIs, back end applications, and network software. One question that comes up a great deal online, though, is how one might go about building a desktop application using Go. For quite some time, the default answer was use Qt and CGO bindings, but several years ago a new project emerged -- one that makes it relatively easy to build GUI applications in pure Go: the Fyne project. Fyne is a project is based around the premise that it should be free and simple to develop an application that can run on all platforms without modification or adaptation. Fyne apps are installed like regular applications on all platforms and deliver great performance and solid user experience.
With Fyne, you can write your code once, in pure Go, and delivery applications that run on Mac OSX, Windows, Linux, Android devices, iOS devices, and as WebAssembly in the browser.
This course is intended to cover the basics of building a GUI application in pure Go. We will cover:
Building Desktop applications: we'll build two: a MarkDown editor and an application that allows users to track (fictional) Gold investments and get real-time information on Gold prices.
