NAME

Prima - a perl graphic toolkit

SYNOPSIS

  use Prima qw(Application Buttons);

  Prima::Window-> create(
      text     => 'Hello world!',
      size     => [ 200, 200],
  )-> insert( Button =>
      centered => 1,
      text     => 'Hello world!',
      onClick  => sub { $::application-> close },
  );

  run Prima;

DESCRIPTION

The toolkit contains two basic set of classes - built-in and external. The built-in set consists of a fixed small amount of classes, coded in C. These classes form a baseline for every Prima object written in perl. Although usage of C is possible with the toolkit, its full power is revealed in perl programming. The external classes are the expandable set of widgets, written completely in perl and communicating with the system using Prima interfaces. The built-in classes can be arrayed in the tree-like hierarchy scheme:

    Object
        Component
                AbstractMenu
                        AccelTable
                        Menu
                        Popup
                Clipboard
                Drawable
                        DeviceBitmap
                        Printer
                        Image
                                Icon
                File
                Timer
                Widget
                        Application
                        Window

The description of these classes can be found by adding Prima:: prefix to the request - for example, the Drawable manpage is located under Prima etc. These classes are declared in Prima::Classes module.

The number of external classes is much bigger, and the whole tree is not depicted here, primarily because of its extent. Some of these classes used as an illustration to the toolkit usage although.

BASIC PROGRAM

The very basic code shown in "SYNOPSIS" is explained here. The code creates a window with a title 'Hello, world' with a button in the center and the same text. The program terminates after the button is hit.

A basic construct for a program written with Prima obviously requires

  use Prima;

code. However, the effective programming requires usage of the other modules, for example, Prima::Buttons, which contains different kinds of button widgets. Prima.pm module can be invoked with a list of such modules, what makes the construction

  use Prima;
  use Prima::Application;
  use Prima::Buttons;
  

shorter by using the following scheme:

  use Prima qw(Application Buttons);

Another basic issue is the event loop, which is called by

   run Prima;

sentence and requires a Prima::Application object to be created before. Invoking Prima::Application standard module is one of the possible ways to create the application object. The program usually terminates after quitting the event loop.

The window is created by invoking

  Prima::Window-> create()

code with the additional parameters. Actually, all Prima objects are created by such a scheme. The class name is passed as the first parameter, and a custom set of parameters is passed aftrewards. These parameters are usually are represented in a syntax of a hash, although actually they are an array. Nevertheless, the hash syntax helps both readability and understanding of the code. The syntax is:

   $new_object = Class-> create(
     parameter => value,
     parameter => value,
     ...
   );

The parameter names are the class properties names, and differ from class to class, although many classes share properties, primarily because of the object inheritance.

In the example, the following properties are set forth :

 Window::text
 Window::size
 Button::text
 Button::centered
 Button::onClick

The properties can be of any type, given that they are scalar. As depicted here, ::text property accepts a string, ::size - an anonymous array of two integers and onClick - a sub.

In short, onXxxx properties form a class of events, which although share the create syntax but are not substitutive but additive ( read more in Prima::Object ). Events are called in the object context when a specific condition occurs. The onClick event here, for example, is called when the user presses ( or otherwise activates ) the button.

SEE ALSO

The toolkit documentation is divided by several subjects, and the information can be found in the following files.

Perl programming:

- Prima::Object - Basic object concepts, properties, events.

- Prima::Drawable - 2-D graphic interface

- Prima::Image - Bitmap routines

- Prima::image-load - Image subsystem and file operations

- Prima::Widget - Window management

- Prima::Window - Window and Dialog - top-level window management

- Prima::Menu - pull-down and pop-up menu objects

- Prima::Timer - programmable periodical events

- Prima::Application - root of widget objects hierarchy

- Prima::Printer - system printing services

- Prima::File - asynchronous stream I/O

C programming

- Prima::internals - Internal architecture

- Prima::codecs - Step-by-step image codec creation

- gencls - gencls, a class compiler tool.

miscellaneous:

- Prima::gp-problems - Graphic subsystem portability issues

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 1997, 2002 The Protein Laboratory, University of Copenhagen. All rights reserved.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

AUTHORS

Dmitry Karasik <dmitry@karasik.eu.org>, Anton Berezin <tobez@tobez.org>, Vadim Belman <voland@lflat.org>,

cpanm Prima

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Prima