Building GUI Applications with Fyne and Go (Golang)

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 deliver 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.

We will cover:

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 this course is for: