About Enlightenment and EFL

[Paul Dufresne]

It looks like Qt is the currently (prefered) GUI library for Genode.
I am trying to push it toward EFL with this message. ;-)

Ok, frankly, I did not begin to develop any application either with Qt or EFL.
I am still kind of searching which GUI libs I should learn.

Anyway, what is Enlightenment?
It might have come to your knowledge as a X11 window manager that no
one use anymore.
Well, Enlightenment version 17 was in developement stage, for about 12
years, and it
just have been released. Which may have made it out of the radar of most people.

This long development period, have made it, elaborate their own GUI
libraries: EFL (Enlightenment Fondation Library ... I think).

They are quite small, and might better fit for this reason alone Genode.

But my interest for it, come mostly from this extract of the website:
-------------
Evas is the canvas layer. It is not a drawing library. It is not like
OpenGL, Cairo, XRender, GDI, DirectFB etc. It is a scene graph library
that retains state of all objects in it. They are created then
manipulated until they are no longer needed, at which point they are
deleted. This allows the programmer to work in terms that a designer
thinks of. It is direct mapping, as opposed to having to convert the
concepts into drawing commands in the right order, calculate minimum
drawing calls needed to get the job done etc.

Evas also handles abstracting the rendering mechanism. With zero
changes the same application can move from software to OpenGL
rendering, as they all use an abstracted scene graph to describe the
world (canvas) to Evas. Evas supports multiple targets, but the most
useful are the high-speed software rendering engines and OpenGL (as
well as OpenGL-ES 2.0).

Evas not only does quality rendering and compositing, but also can
scale, rotate and fully 3D transform objects, allowing for
sought-after 3D effects in your interfaces. It supplies these
abilities in both software and OpenGL rendering, so you are never
caught with unexpected loss of features. The software rendering is
even fast enough to provide the 3D without any acceleration on devices
for simple uses.
-------------

I like this idea of not to have to care about the exact rendering.

Anyway, for more info, this was taken from:
http://www.enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en

As for seeing a bit what it can do, I could suggest to try Bodhi
Linux, which is a Linux distribution that use Enlightenment:
http://bodhilinux.com/ (not totaly sure it really shows clearly the
link with Enlightenment 17).