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

The toolkit is combined from two basic set of classes - core and external. The core classes are coded in C and form a base line 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 easily expandable set of widgets, written completely in perl and communicating with the system using Prima library calls.

The core classes form an 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 'Hello, world' title and a centered button with the same text. The program terminates after the button is pressed.

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 set of button widgets. "Prima.pm" module can be invoked 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;

sentence and requires a "Prima::Application" object to be created beforehand. Invoking "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 window is created by invoking

        Prima::MainWindow->new();

or

        Prima::MainWindow-> 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 afterwards. These parameters are usually represented in a hash syntax, although actually passed as an array. The hash syntax is preferred for the code readability:

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

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

In the example, the following properties are set :

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

Property values 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.

onXxxx are special properties that form a class of events, which share 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 "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 own 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 "--help" argument to get the list of supported arguments. Programmaticaly, setting and obtaining these options can be done by using "Prima::options" routine.

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

        BEGIN { local @ARGV; require Prima; }

will also do.

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>,