godesktopgui

Make a standalone desktop GUI application with Go

Go has neither a native GUI, nor mature bindings to Qt or another similarly sophisticated library. So this program explores a way for Go to produce a locally running GUI app using an HTML5 web-app architecture, in which the content delivery and the dedicated server are compiled together into a single deployable executable.

It comprises less than 100 lines of Go code. It additionally, compiles the html, css and template files required into the executable, so the executable has no runtime dependencies apart from a browser to display it.

The auxilliary files are converting into compilable Go source code using the github.com/jteeuwen/go-bindata Go package. The example GUI is a loose copy of the Github GUI, and its controls, layout and style are all implented with the Bootstrap CSS library.

Go's native html templating is used.

This repository includes a screenshot of the GUI.

Build it and try it out

To get the code:

go get -u github.com/peterhoward42/godesktopgui/...

To compile the html, css etc. files into a compilable Go source code module:

go get -u github.com/jteeuwen/go-bindata/...
cd github.com/peterhoward42/godesktopgui
<your gopath>/bin/go-bindata static/... templates/...

To build the server executable:

cd github.com/peterhoward42/godesktopgui
go install

You'll find it in this directory (simply run it:

<your gopath>/bin/