Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL)

EFL is a set of fast and light GUI libraries created during the development of Enlightenment E17 desktop environment.

It is a primary GUI toolkit for OpenInkpot. All the OpenInkpot applications, unless there are serious objections, are to use EFL.

Getting EFL

Gentoo

layman -a enlightenment && emerge x11-wm/enlightenment

builds the current E17 from svn (see also  http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/E17). Note: You need the latest SVN versions (-9999), the snapshot versions are too old. You'll also need media-libs/libextractor for MadShelf.

Debian, Ubuntu

Recent version of packages is maintained by E17 team:

•  Debian and Ubuntu packages on E17 wiki

The line for apt.sources can be found at  http://packages.enlightenment.org/. Don't forget to add proper key to your system (as descibed on the given webpage).

Now you can install the necessary packages:

apt-get install libedje-dev libefreet-dev

Don't forget to install the usual development packages:

apt-get install build-essential dpkg-dev libtool gettext

For building themes with edje_cc and edje_decc, get libedje-bin:

apt-get install libedje-bin

Other distributions

EFL SVN repository is at  svn.enlightenment.org.

Check out the following modules:

• eina
• eet
• evas
• ecore
• efreet
• embryo
• edje

Build them in the same order by traditional ./configure && make && make install.

Watch for the configure output: libraries tend to silently disable features which require missing libraries.

Detailed instructions are on  E17 wiki.

Documentation

Basic

•  EFL introduction
•  Another introduction (pdf)
•  The EFL Cookbook (pdf) contains common recipes for most EFL components. A good read in order to discover some of the endless possibilities of EFL.

Edje (theming engine)

•  Building Interfaces with Edje (pdf) contains almost everything you need to develop themeable EFL application which use the Edje Layout engine. Make sure that you know a bit about Evas (the EFL canvas) before reading this document.
•  Application development with Edje (html),  (pdf).

Reference guides

There are reference guides of varying completeness for all EFL components:

•  Documentation (see the "EFL API Docs" links)