Evas is a powerful canvas. While most developers have used the Canvas widget of their favourite X11 toolkit, Evas is taking the canvas idea a huge step forward. It actually keeps track of what is rendered on screen. Unlike the usual canvas widget, Evas knows that you created a rectangle at a specific point on screen and it knows how to move it or resize it without having to rely on external data structures. Evas objects are essentially "draw and forget" objects. No need for the programmer to keep state. No need for the programmer to deal with redrawing and repainting. All this is gone. Evas is also highly optimized and can even run in embedded systems with constrained memory and low power processors. Apart from the X11 back-end, it also runs on OpenGL, Xrender, and frame-buffer devices.

The Edje Layout Engine is a breakthrough (in the humble opinion of the unbiased author of this document!). It can not be compared with another preexisting library (at least in the open source field) because it is simply unique. Edje allows you to describe a graphical user interface without writing a single line of C code. You describe what your interface looks like and how you want it to appear and act on screen. Edje then takes the tough job to translate all this into low level code and bundle everything in a single theme file. This theme file is distributed along with the executable of your application which contains the functionality of the application. Your application is essentially split into two parts. A graphical part which knows nothing about C code and the functionality which knows nothing about GUI. This split makes the code development and theme creation really easy compared with current solutions. It also allows you (the developer) to easily change the functionality back-end with out touching the GUI and vice-versa. You can ship to your users a new theme for the same app, or upgrade just the functionality without changing the GUI. Users can also create new themes without getting in contact with C code.

Ecore is a library which provides all the low-level stuff of your application. You can compare it with Glib from GTK+. It contains data structures, IPC mechanisms, easy networking, and generally all helper functions you would expect so that you don't have to re-invent the wheel. It glues together major EFL libraries so that it gives you a start point for your first applications. It even abstracts some functionality of common UNIX and X capabilities. Not to mention that you can always use Ecore for an application that isn't even graphical. Before starting to implement your own data structure/X11 wrapper function/networking code/e.t.c., check the Ecore documentation. Maybe it is already there with a clean, simple EFL API.

Most themes delivered via the Internet nowadays are rather simple in their structure. Although they appear to be single files, in reality they are a bunch of files compressed using the usual compression methods (e.g. zip or .tar.gz). The application that uses the themes uncompresses them (usually upon installation and not on the fly) and a directory containing all the images of the theme is added to the application directory. Eet takes a completely different approach. The theme file is a single file which contains compressed images and the description of the interface too. This information is read by the Edje layout library to create the interface of your application on the fly. The theme is never uncompressed unless it is modified by a themer (and then compressed again). Moving around themes means moving around files. You can also use Eet as a general storage format for images, text, or even arbitrary data chunks. Eet is best known for storing themes but nothings prevents you from using it for all your storage needs.

People always want more power. Look what happened with HTML. Although HTML pages are static, soon enough JavaScript appeared along with Flash. Pages became dynamic. Then the Ajax buzzword came along and we have to believe that all web pages should look and act like local applications. While all this functionality is an overkill for the hypertext-based Internet, having the ability to script your interface is not always a bad idea. This is what the Embryo scripting brings to Edje. Edje themes can now contain small Embryo scripts which allow for more interesting interfaces. Although Embryo is not C code, some pure themers may think that the layout engine is contaminated with programming code, therefore Embryo scripts are optional. If you are a themer, you can use Edje as you think it should be used, while if you are more on the programming side you will soon discover the value of Embryo scripts for your interfaces. It's all about choice.

Epeg is a small thumbnailing library specially optimized for Jpeg files. It seems that nowadays most people keep their huge picture collections in the Jpeg format. The fact that it was embraced by camera manufacturers means that more and more Jpeg images will be stored on digital media and hard disks. To search all these images, thumbnails are used, so a library exactly for this purpose will serve our needs well. Epeg can be used standalone in your programs or again via the EFL infrastructure (Esmart, Ecore, Epsilon)

Epsilon is a more general thumbnailing library. It supports PNG, JPEG, and all other formats offered my imlib2 (see below) and Evas. It is closer to EFL than Epeg, and it can even take advantage of Epeg for Jpeg images if it is present on the system. Epsilon essentially abstracts the thumbnailing process for images, while Epeg is clearly targeted to the Jpeg format. Again, this is all about choice.

With all the power that Edje gives to the programmer, one would think that she should be happy. Esmart is a helper library that gives some additional capabilities to Edje without blowing it up to a full toolkit (yet). Esmart gives the programmer the ability to have containers for the GUI (think the vbox and hbox of GTK+). It allows for transparent applications which seem to be cool these days (think Eterm). We mean applications which adapt their background to the X root window. Transparency itself is included already in Evas for the canvas and its objects. Esmart also wraps around epsilon for thumbnailing support and finally adds some more toolkit facilities (text entries, file dialogs, and draggable objects). Esmart is required for the Entrance application (a replacement of xdm/gdm/kdm based on EFL). You can use it for your application easily because all Esmart capabilities (as well as Ecore facilities and Evas engines) exist on separate library files.

Finally, if you want to use EFL as a toolkit similar to GTK+ and QT and just want to have a widget set available for your applications, you can use EWL. It offers the familiar toolkit facilities based on the EFL libraries and ties everything up under widgets which have different purposes. If you have programmed on any X11 toolkit, then programming for EWL should be a well-known experience.

Imlib2 is not strictly an EFL library but since some of the EFL applications and libraries use it, we include it here for reference. Imlib2 is a highly optimized and ultra fast imaging library which predates the EFL. You are not expected to use it directly unless you are a hard-core graphics programmer who knows the internals of graphics systems and image formats. Imlib2 ties seamlessly to Evas and allows you to really tinker with images at a low level. Notice also that Imlib2 is not the second version of Imlib, but rather a completely different library (Imlib1 is by the way obsolete). Several applications outside the EFL/Enlightenment world use Imlib2 (such as the feh image viewer).