In this chapter, we looked at our first modern widget toolkit, Shiny, which has been designed specifically for the Go language. We explored its design principles and how it manages to support cross-platform graphical application development without the need for external dependencies. We also saw that its design makes use of powerful features of the Go language, such as concurrency and the standard library.

The graphical design principles behind Shiny provide a new interpretation of the desktop application GUI, which will be familiar to users of the Android mobile operating system (due to them using the same material design approach). While exploring its graphical capabilities, we saw that the widget set is currently in its early stages and so isn't yet ready to support the GoMail application we've been creating in previous chapters. To explore the capabilities of the Shiny toolkit, we instead developed an image viewer application, which is better suited to the current feature set. We saw how powerful the rendering capabilities of Shiny are, but also that there are a few challenges around creating a rich application user interface.

In the next chapter, we will look at another toolkit that takes a modern approach to the widget toolkit. Nuklear also helps developers to create cross-platform graphical user interfaces but does so from an embedded user interface approach. We'll explore the Go bindings for this library, named nk.