PDL::Drawing::Prima

A PDL interface to the Prima drawing commands.

Buried deep inside the wonderful, Perl-centric Prima toolkit is a set of cross-platform C functions that handle all of the drawing operations. PDL's strength is its threading engine, and this module provides a fully PDL-threaded subset of Prima drawing functions. As such, this module provides a way to quickly perform many drawing operations on Prima Widgets.

Prima makes it very easy to call subclassed functions from C code (and therefore PDL::PP code), so these bindings perform the drawing operations on any object whose class is derived from Prima::Drawable. This means that you can perform these drawing operations on Widgets, rasterized canvases, and even Postscript canvases.

For more information about this module and what it provides, see the documentation for PDL::Drawing::Prima.

INSTALLATION

There are a number of ways to install this module. The simplest is to install it using CPAN:

cpan PDL::Drawing::Prima

or using cpanm:

cpanm PDL::Drawing::Prima

If you have your hands on the actual source code (from the git repository listed below, or by looking at this module from the CPAN shell), you would do the following:

# Linux/Mac           # Windows
perl Build.PL         perl Build.PL
./Build               Build
./Build test          Build test
./Build install       Build install

The test suite is tiny at the moment. I apologize. To make up for it, you can look into the examples directory and see if they work. A more comprehensive test suite is on the list of things to do next. If this project gets a bit of momentum behind it, I truly hope that the test suite gets some much-needed attention.

DEPENDENCIES

The installation of this module depends on a working C compiler. It also depends on the Perl Data Language and the Prima GUI toolkit. You can install both of these using CPAN.

Note that Prima may give trouble on Linux systems, not because it is Windows or Mac-centric, but because you may not have the X11 header files installed. Of course, the installation script will tell you if this is a problem, and on most systems it is easily resolved.

There is another potential hurdle installing this module if you are using the Prima package that comes with Debian's repository. Last time I checked, the Prima Debian package was improperly built and does not list the correct location of Prima's CORE directory. That makes it impossible to link against apricot.h (Prima's main library). I may be able to write a special exception into the Build.PL for this, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

CODE REPOSITORY

This project is being actively developed at Github. Find the latest at:

https://github.com/run4flat/PDL-Drawing-Prima

COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

Portions of this module's code are copyright (c) 2011 The Board of Trustees at the University of Illinois.

Portions of this module's code are copyright (c) 2011-2012 Northwestern University.

This module's documentation are copyright (c) 2011-2012 David Mertens.

All rights reserved.

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

Author: David Mertens <dcmertens.perl.csharp@gmail.com>

Note that my email is intentionally obfuscated. Knowing that I am a Perl programmer, you can probably remove the part that does not belong.