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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 X, Win32 and OS/2 PM.

PREREQUISITES

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
libungif
libtiff
libX11 - support for native X11 bitmap files

For Win32 and OS/2 platforms, libprigraph library can be used instead. The library supports most of the popular image file formats, including BMP, PCX, GIF, JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and is distributed in binary form for these platforms:

Win32, native : http://www.prima.eu.org/download/gbm-bin-win32.zip.
Win32, cygwin : http://www.prima.eu.org/download/gbm-bin-cygwin.zip.
OS/2 : http://www.prima.eu.org/download/gbm-bin-os2.zip.

The zip files contain prigraph.dll and other DLL files if needed. The files are to be put in PATH. The library files, .LIB or .A, are used when compiling Prima from source and to be put in LIBPATH.

SOURCE DISTRIBUTION INSTALLATION

Create a makefile by running Makefile.PL using perl and then run make ( or gmake, or nmake for Win32 and OS/2):

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, INCPATH+=/some/include and LIBPATH+=/some/lib semantics should be used to tell Makefile.PL about these.

To install Prima into a non-default directory, for example your home directory:

perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=$HOME/lib/perl

If compilation process fails because Makefile contains invalid switches for your compiler or linker, try changing these by specifying arguments to Makefile.PL, where the most useful are:

COMPILER - type of compiler ( gcc, emx, mscv32, bcc32, irixcc) CC - compiler command
CFLAGS - compiler arguments
LD - linked command
LDFLAGS - linker arguments

Look in Makefile.PL for details.

BINARY DISTRIBUTION INSTALLATION

Available only for MSWin32 and OS/2. 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 <DScott@dgt.com>
Teo Sankaro <teo_sankaro@hotmail.com>