NAME

Prima - a Perl graphic toolkit

SYNOPSIS

use Prima qw(Application Buttons);

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

run Prima;

See more screenshots at http://prima.eu.org/big-picture.

DESCRIPTION

Prima is a classic 2D GUI toolkit that works under Windows and X11 environments. The toolkit features a rich widget library, extensive 2D graphic support, PDF generation, modern Unicode text input and output, and supports a wide set of image formats. Additionally, the RAD-style Visual Builder and POD viewer are included. The toolkit can interoperate with other popular event loop libraries.

CLASS HIERARCHY

The toolkit is built with a combination of two basic sets of classes - core and external. The core classes are coded in C and form a baseline for every Prima object written in Perl. The usage of C is possible together with the toolkit; however, its full power is revealed in the Perl domain. The external classes present an easily expandable set of widgets, written entirely in Perl and communicating with the system using Prima library calls.

The core classes form a hierarchy, which is displayed below:

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

The external classes are derived from these; the list of widget classes can be found below in "SEE ALSO".

BASIC PROGRAM

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

A basic construct for a program written with Prima requires

use Prima;

code; however, effective programming requires the usage of the other modules, for example, Prima::Buttons, which contains various button widgets. The Prima.pm module can be invoked together with a list of such modules, which 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;

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

The main window is created by invoking

Prima::MainWindow->new();

Prima::MainWindow->create()

code with additional parameters. All Prima objects are created by the same scheme; the class name is passed as the first parameter, and a custom set of parameters is passed afterward:

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

Here, parameters are the class property names, and they differ from class to class. Classes often have common properties, primarily due to object inheritance.

In the example, the following properties are used:

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

Property values can be of any scalar type. For example, the ::text property accepts a string, ::size - an anonymous array of two integers, and onClick - a sub.

onXxxx are special properties that describe events that can be used together with the new/create syntax, and are additive when the regular properties are substitutive (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.

API

This section describes miscellaneous methods, registered in the Prima:: namespace.

message TEXT

Displays a system message box with TEXT.

open_file, save_file

When the Prima::Dialog::FileDialog module is loaded, these shortcut methods are registered in the Prima:: namespace as an alternative to the same methods in the module's namespace. The methods execute standard file open and save dialogs, correspondingly.

See Prima::Dialog::FileDialog for more.

run

Enters the program event loop. The loop is ended when Prima::Application's destroy or close method is called.

parse_argv @ARGS

Parses Prima options from @ARGS, returns unparsed arguments.

OPTIONS

Prima applications do not have a portable set of arguments; it depends on the particular platform. Run

perl -e '$ARGV[0]=q(--help); require Prima'

or any Prima program with a --help argument to get the list of supported arguments. Programmatically, setting and obtaining these options can be done by using the Prima::options routine.

In cases where the Prima argument parsing conflicts with the application options, use Prima::noARGV to disable the automatic parsing; also see parse_argv. Alternatively, the construct

BEGIN { local @ARGV; require Prima; }

will also do.

The Prima manual pages often provide information for more than one Prima class. To quickly find out the manual page of a desired class, as well as display the inheritance information, use the prima-class command. The command can produce output in the text and pod formats; the latter feature is used by the standard Prima documentation viewer podview ( see File/Run/prima-class ).

COPYRIGHT

This program is distributed under the BSD License.

AUTHORS

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

To install Prima, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.

cpanm

cpanm Prima

CPAN shell

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Prima

For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.

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