Shiny is an experimental GUI library designed from scratch and written purely in Go. It was created to explore what's possible when building a cross-platform GUI for the Go language. It is not an official GUI toolkit for Go (though it was created by developers at Google) but provides a solid basis for graphical applications on most supported Go platforms.

This chapter explores how to use the Shiny project to build cross-platform graphical applications without the need for C libraries or pre-installed dependencies. The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• The design principles of the Shiny project and its widgets
• How the toolkit is built to support multiple platforms without external drivers or native libraries
• Building a basic graphical application that can easily cross-compile to different systems
• Creating a a complete application using Shiny

At the end of this chapter, you should be well-versed in this experimental new API.