EWL

The Enlightened Widget Library (EWL) is a high level toolkit providing all of the widgets you'll need to create your application. The expansive object oriented style API provides tools to easily expand widgets and containers for new situations.

Features

Among the wide variety of features EWL provides are:

• Object, Widget and Container abstraction layers;
• A variety of Containers for laying out widgets in arrangements such as boxes, tables and lists;
• Simple widgets such as Buttons, Labels, Images and Progressbars;
• Decorative Containers for wrapping borders and controls around widgets;
• High level data abstractions including lists, expandable trees and combo boxes;
• An extraordinarily flexible theming system;
• High level abstractions to build applications quickly, such as file and color dialogs, as well as a menu system;
• A flexible event system to allow application programmers to hook into nearly every change that occurs;
• Abstracted EWL Engine backends allow for easily re-using portions of engines to support new platforms.
• IO abstraction manager to enable mapping of mimetypes to widget representations;
• EWL Test a tutorial and testing application.

Documentation

The main documentation for EWL is the API reference. If you prefer to build it yourself to have a off-line copy and you have doxygen installed you can generate it by typing:

   sh gendoc

In the ewl directory. This should generate a full set of documents in ewl/doc/html.

Along with the API docs there is also the EWL Book (pdf-file). The EWL Book is also available in SVN DOCS/ewlbook. You can either generate the document yourself, if you have the required packages installed, or look in the pre-rendered directory for a current copy.

The EWL Test application also includes the source code for each of the tests along with, in some cases, tutorials for the tests as well.

EWL Callback Information contains a listing of all available callbacks in EWL and gives information on when they're triggered and what the resulting event structure contains. It also provides information on attaching callbacks and creating custom callbacks.

Tutorials

We've started to slowly add some introduction articles to the wiki to help people get started with EWL. These introductions may build off of each other, or be totally random, not quite sure yet. The first one; EWL Introduction helps you create a very simple image displaying application. The second; EWL Introduction II expands on this to show a preview of a collection of images and allow the user to drop images onto the application that are then displayed. The third introduction; EWL Introduction III extends the application made in EWL Introduction II to add the ability to display an icon as a full size image and do some simple manipulation on it.

There are a few tutorials available around the Internet for different parts of EWL.

• Ewl Drop Support. Information on configuring DND drop events for your widgets.
• Small as Small Can Be. The minimum amount of work you'll need to do to create a new EWL widget.
• Finding the Tree in the Forest. Working with Ewl_Tree2.
• Is it in you? Introduction to Ewl_IO_Manager.
• The View EWL_MVC information.
• Round Peg, Square Hole. Ewl configuration information.
• Filler Up. Introduction to Ewl fill policies.
• By popular search. Introduction to the Ewl_Combo widget and Ewl_MVC.

If you've got something about EWL you'd like to have better explained please add a request to the EWL Tutorial Requests page and someone will try to help you out.

Development

Anyone interested in EWL development is encouraged to join #ewl on irc.freenode.net, log any bugs found in EWL to our bug tracker, and to take part in general discussion of EWL Development Ideas. For a general idea of what we're planning on next, or to get a feel for when a release will be cut, you can take a look at the EWL Roadmap.

Additionally, we encourage posting EWL Performance data to the wiki, especially if the data can help identify hot spots in the code that could be optimized.

Releases

The latest release was done on December 4, 2007 and is EWL Release 0.5.2. Please refer to the EWL Roadmap to see the goals for the next release.

Previous releases: EWL Release 0.5.1