EFL 1.0 Is Finally Released 115
Lisandro writes "The Enlightenment crew has finally released the first version of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which the E17 desktop is built on."
Adds reader mu22le:
"Among the Enlightenment libraries hitting version 1.0 are Eina (core data structure), Eet (data encode/decode and storage), Evas (canvas and scenegraph rendering ), Ecore (core mainloop, display abstraction and utility), Embryo (small virtual machine and compiler), Edie (GUI layout and animation), E_Dbus, Efreet (handling of freedesktop.org standards), and Eeze (udev wrapping)."
Getting it right can take a while -- a preview of the EFL libraries first appeared in 2004. Enlightenment has never stopped looking cool.
Enlightenment's utility (Score:5, Insightful)
In retrospect, I've got to admire the dedication and self-control demonstrated by the E developers.
Back when E17 was started, it was a bloated (if awesome) project. I got sick and tired of waiting for it to finish, and pretty much soured on it when they started changing things drastically, making components (like efm - the file manager component of E17 at the time) discontinued. Granted, that's partially to be expected, but it was in development for years at that time - and reasonably stable despite.
Flash forward to now: it's a very, very lightweight window manager (compared to many others, at least) with a fairly rich featureset. It's been used recently on the "ePC" (2 years ago?) and IIRC it's been used on phones. The libraries are featureful and there is quite a lot of functionality exposed in the interfaces for the size of everything. The windowing toolkits are fast, and the result on my screen is likewise fast (and smooth) - even without acceleration. The libraries themselves are basically like the fltk2 toolkit, in many ways - but significantly more 'polished'.
It may have taken 10 years to 'get right' (or close to it) but the end result is, frankly, quite impressive.
Re:Review? Screenshots? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since they are graphical libraries a series of screen shots detailing what they are capable of wouldn't be too bad.
I think it's a fair question to ask if you want to dedicate some time into using them.
Quick question: (Score:5, Insightful)
If they want to promote a product that's essential to the UI of a desktop/handheld OS then why is their official site pretty much devoid of full-size images to give visitors a first impression?
Re:Just thumbing... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why are there literally 5 or 6 different frameworks in Linux, each with their own container classes, marshaling, runloop, event handling, and string libraries again?
Because 5 or 6 different groups of people thought it would be fun to write their own desktop frameworks.