Devices

Enlightenment and EFL use desktop Linux systems as a primary method of development because it is fast and simple to do so, but all of it is written with the express goal in mind of also working on devices from Mobile Phones, to Televisions, Netbooks and more.

We have run and tested on x86-32, x86-64, Atom, Power-PC, ARM (ARM9, ARM11, Cortex-A8 and more), MIPS, Sparc, and many other architectures. The suggested minimum RAM required for a full Linux system + EFL application is 16MB, but you may be able to get by on 8MB. For full functionality 64MB or more is suggested. As little as a 200Mhz ARM core will provide sufficient processing power (depending on needs).

Screens from even less than QVGA (320x240 or 240x320) screens all the way up to and beyond full-HD (1920x1080) are covered by EFL. It has the ability to scale user interfaces to almost any sane resolution, as well as adapt to differing input device resolutions, from mouse and stylus to fat fingers. It can draw displays from e-paper through 8-bit paletted displays, 16bit beautifully dithered ones all the way to full 24/32bit OLED beauties.

Enlightenment is built by designers and programmers who want others to be able to do more with less. Some of Enlightenment's libraries do not do anything with graphics at all, but it is the ones that do that are the shining stars of the Enlightenment world.

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.

Edje is a meta-object design library that is somewhere between Flash, PSD, SVG and HTML+CSS. It separates design out from code and into a dynamically loaded data file. This file is compressed and loaded very quickly, along with being cached and shared betweeen instances.

This allows design to be provided at runtime by different design (EDJ) files, leaving the programmer to worry about overall application implementation and coarse grained UI as opposed to needing to worry about all the little details that the artists may vary even until the day before shipping the product.

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