eCosPro-Prism GUI

The Prism Runtime Framework provides developers with a proven software solution for the creation of complex GUI applications, supporting the needs of a broad range of market segments including automotive, consumer electronics, infotainment and medical devices. In common with eCos, Prism is small, fast, robust, customizable and easily ported to a wide variety of different hardware designs.

Creating a Dynamic User Experience

Prism enables the design of sophisticated embedded user interfaces that incorporate rich animations, screens transitions, alpha blending, anti-aliasing, and canvas transformations. These are key features demanded by modern interactive products to provide feedback and enhance the visual appeal of applications.

A broad set of basic widget types are included such as buttons, text gadgets, animations, menus, sliders and bitmap display objects. Advanced classes include treeview, spreadsheet and tag control panels. All of these display widgets can be fully customized, both at compile time and at runtime, to meet your specific requirements. Many customizations are supported by simply modifying style properties for the various widgets. Further customization is supported by "owner draw" style class derivation, allowing you full control over the appearance and operation of every component of your UI design.

Core features include unlimited canvases (hardware accelerated when supported), per-pixel and per-canvas alpha blending, bitmap rotation and scaling, text scaling and rotation. Prism graphics can be overlaid on real-time video or alpha blended using multiple graphical layers. The library is easily configured for an infinite variety of display resolutions, orientations and color depths. Canvas transformations allow the next level of user experience, providing 2.5D animations and screen flows that make your interface come alive!

Anti-aliasing of fonts and all drawing primitives help to deliver the presentation quality expected in modern UIs. Prism also provides integrated support for dynamic screen rotation, enabling seamless display rotation for handheld devices.

Simplifying GUI Development

Complex GUI design & development is simplified and accelerated by Prism's Insight GUI development platform. Insight enables you to completely design your user interface in a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG environment. The Insight Resource Editor defines buttons, menus, and other widgets so developers can customize screen layout as required. With the Animation Designer, developers can specify screen flows and select from a wide range of built-in or customize screen transition effects and animations. Prism Insight offers a large range of data output formats such as ANSI C/C++ source code, XML screen description files, and binary resource files, enabling developers to tailor output to the requirements and capabilities of target systems. Development of GUI prototypes is supported on both Windows and Linux/X11 platforms, all while maintaining 100% portability To the final target hardware.

Industry leading multi-lingual application support includes full Unicode, SJIS, and Chinese Big5 character encoding support. String table editing and string resource file generation facilities are incorporated within Insight's Resource Manager tool, delivering a straightforward UI translation capability.

Meeting the Challenges of your Embedded Design

Prism was written by embedded software engineers for embedded software engineers. The code size has been kept to a minimum and the performance of the Prism Runtime Framework is second to none. The low-overhead approach and minimalist design yield fluid user interfaces on even the most performance limited embedded targets.

The standard Prism runtime supports a wide range of color depths up to 32 bits-per-pixel (bpp), while the alternative Prism Micro runtime supports color depths up to 256 colors for more basic resource constrained systems. A typical full-featured Prism-based GUI delivers a footprint of roughly 180KB of code (dependent on processor, compiler, and enabled feature set), 4KB stack and 16KB dynamic memory.

Prism is fully integrated with eCos messaging, memory management and synchronization primitives to provide an efficient, high performance, real-time mulithreaded GUI environment. Prism can also be configured to support multiple GUI threads. These threads can be of differing priorities and can each directly create, display and control any number of GUI panels or child widgets. Prism input devices are interrupt driven, and make use of eCos services to ensure low latency feedback from user input - which is of particular importantance in touch controlled designs.

The Prism Runtime Framework includes full source code and it's licensing is completely royalty free.

eCosCentric directly distributes and supports eCosPro-Prism, which has been fully validated and certified for use with eCosPro. In conjunction with BWE we also provide consultancy services to optimize and/or port Prism if device drivers are not already available for your hardware. For information regarding pricing and services please contact us for a detailed discussion.

For further product information please read the Prism Brochure or browse Blue Water Embedded's website.