User Contributed Perl Documentation

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.

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>,

2024-08-20

perl v5.40.0

Source file:	Prima.3pm.en.gz (from perl-Prima 1.74000-1.1)
Source last updated:	2024-08-20T05:30:45Z
Converted to HTML:	2024-12-25T01:26:29Z