DESCRIPTION

PRIMA is a general purpose extensible graphical user interface toolkit with a rich set of standard widgets and an emphasis on 2D image processing tasks. A Perl program using PRIMA looks and behaves identically on X11 and Win32.

PREREQUISITES

Graphic libraries

Prima can use several graphic libraries to handle image files. Compiling Prima with at least one library, preferably for GIF files is strongly recommended, because internal library images are stored in GIFs. Support for the following libraries can be compiled in on all platforms:

libXpm
libpng
libjpeg
libgif
libtiff
libX11 - support for native X11 bitmap files

For Win32, CPAN contains binary distributions that can be installed just for this purpose:

it should work for all MSVC and GCC compilers and for native, cygwin, and mingw/strawberry perl runtimes.

Fribidi

To support bi-directional text input and output you'll need Text::Bidi module from CPAN. The module is not a prerequisite; it'll need the external fribidi library to build. On windows the library is not installed by default, you can grab it here:

http://prima.eu.org/download/fribidi-win32.zip

SOURCE DISTRIBUTION INSTALLATION

Create a makefile by running Makefile.PL using perl and then run make ( or gmake, or nmake for Win32):

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

If 'perl Makefile.PL' fails, the compilation history along with errors can be found in makefile.log.

If make fails with message

** No image codecs found

that means you don't have image libraries that Prima supports in your path. See PREREQUISITES section.

If some of the required libraries or include files can not be found, INC=-I/some/include and LIBS=-L/some/lib semantics should be used to tell Makefile.PL about these. Check ExtUtils::MakeMaker for more.

GTK2

It is recommended to build Prima with GTK2 on X11 installations, because in that case Prima will use standard GTK fonts, colors, and file dialogs. By default Prima tries to build with it, but if you don't want it, run

perl Makefile.PL WITH_GTK2=0

BINARY DISTRIBUTION INSTALLATION

Available only for MSWin32. Please use installation from source for the other platforms.

To install the toolkit from the binary distribution run

perl ms_install.pl

You have to patch Prima::Config.pm manually if you need to compile prima-dependent modules.

USAGE EXAMPLES

Try running the toolkit examples, by default installed in INSTALLSITEARCH/Prima/examples directory ( find it by running perl -V:installsitearch ). All examples and programs included into the distribution can be run either by their name or with perl as argument - for example, ..../generic or perl ..../generic . ( perl ..../generic.bat for win32 )

Typical code starts with

use Prima qw(Application);

and ends with

run Prima;

which is an event loop call. Start from the following code:

use Prima qw(Application Buttons);

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

run Prima;

Or, alternatively, start the VB program, which is the toolkit visual builder.

MORE INFORMATION

The toolkit contains set of POD files describing its features, and the programming interfaces. Run 'podview Prima' or 'perldoc Prima' command to start with the main manual page.

Visit http://www.prima.eu.org/ for the recent versions of the toolkit. You can use cvs update feature to keep in touch. The mailing list on the toolkit is available, you can ask questions there. See the Prima homepage for details.

COPYRIGHT

AUTHORS

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

CREDITS

David Scott
Teo Sankaro
Kai Fiebach
Johannes Blankenstein
Mike Castle
H.Merijn Brand
Richard Morgan
Kevin Ryde
Chris Marshall
Slaven Rezic
Waldemar Biernacki
Andreas Hernitscheck
David Mertens
Teo Sankaro
Gabor Szabo
Fabio D'Alfonso
Rob "Sisyphus"
Chris Marshall
Reini Urban
Nadim Khemir
Vikas N Kumar
Upasana Shukla
Sergey Romanov
Mathieu Arnold
Petr Pisar
Judy Hawkins
Myra Nelson
Sean Healy
Ali Yassen
Maximilian Lika

MaxPerl/Prima