Filebrowser + thumbnail viewer + http server

Expanded example based on lxn’s excellent walk win32 libraries https://github.com/lxn/walk filebrowser example, adding many new
features.

Why?

I’m trying to explore golang’s capabilities and performance in developing a multithreaded and memory intensive windows desktop app.
For inspiration and comparison, I used my old application, Antares12 which was built using Delphi2007.
So far golang didn’t disappoint!

• To download Antares12, go to https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15522093/antares121setup.zip

Features:

• Image browser, displaying thumbnail of images in a grid.
• Image http server, serving thumbnail of images in a folder. Use http://localhost:8080/users/albums or http://localhost:8080/users/photos while the app is running.
• Very fast and efficient multi threaded thumbnail processing with goroutines and channels.
• Resizeable thumbnail size.
• Filesystem/directory monitoring for changes (new/delete/renamed/modified files)

Golang’s features explored here:

• Goroutine, channels and synchronizations.
• Maps, slices
• cgo interfacing with external c libs
• Database interface with sqlite3
• Image processing (drawings/transforms)

Additional fabulous golang libraries used here:

• https://github.com/pixiv/go-libjpeg/jpeg
• https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3
• https://github.com/fsnotify/fsnotify
• https://github.com/anthonynsimon/bild/transform
• https://github.com/gorilla/

Status and observations:

• Go language constructs comfortably matched object pascal (delphi) constructs.
• Many low level routines can easily be converted to golang.
• Goroutines and channels are truly handy in handling concurrent tasks.
• Performance in performing cpu and memory intensive operations is excellent. Comparable and sometimes better than delphi.
• Memory comsumption is larger than delphi/32bit, but not by much. No optimization on my part yet.
• So far so good…