Enlightenment Foundation Libraries

The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) are a set of graphics libraries that grew out of the development of Enlightenment, a window manager and Wayland compositor. The project's focus is to make the EFL a flexible yet powerful and easy to use set of tools to extend the capabilities of both the Enlightenment window manager and other software projects based on the EFL. The libraries are meant to be portable and optimized to be functional even on mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets.

The libraries were created for version 0.17 of the window manager.

EFL is developed by Enlightenment.org with some sponsorship from Samsung, ProFUSION and Free.fr. EFL is free and open source software.

Evas is the EFL canvas library, for creating areas, or windows, that applications can draw on in an X Window System. The EFL uses hardware-acceleration where possible to allow it to work faster, but is also designed to work on lower-end hardware, falling back to lower color and quality for graphics if necessary. Unlike most canvas libraries, it is primarily image-based (as opposed to vector-based) and fully state-aware (the vast majority of canvases are stateless, requiring the programmer to keep track of state).

Edje is a library that attempts to separate the user interface from the application. It allows applications to be skinnable, so that it is possible to change the GUI of an application without changing the application itself. Edje-based applications use files which contain the specifications for the GUI layout that is to be used. Edje themes are contained using EET generated files.

Ecore is an event abstraction, and modular convenience library, intended to simplify a number of common tasks. It is modular, so applications need only call the minimal required libraries for a job. Ecore simplifies working with X, Evas, and also a few other things, such as network communications and threads.

Embryo implements a scripting language used by other parts of the EFL, such as Edje. The language has a C-like syntax, and was based on the SMALL language.