What is Ecore?

Ecore is a clean and tiny event loop library with many modules to do lots of convenient things for a programmer, to save time and effort. It’s small and lean, designed to work from embedded systems all the way up to large and powerful multi-cpu workstations. The main loop has a number of primitives to be used with its main loop. It serializes all the primitives and allows for great responsiveness without the need for threads(or any other concurrency).

Timers

Timers serve two main purposes: doing something at a specified time and repeatedly doing something with a set interval.

Animators

Ecore provides a facility called animators, so named since the intended use was in animations, that facilitates knowing what percentage of a given interval has elapsed. This is perfect for performing animations, but is not limited to that use, it can, for example, also be used to create a progress bar. see Animator

Pollers

Ecore Poller provides infrastructure for the creation of pollers. Pollers are, in essence, callbacks that share a single timer per type. Because not all pollers need to be called at the same frequency the user may specify the frequency in ticks(each expiration of the shared timer is called a tick, in ecore poller parlance) for each added poller. Ecore pollers should only be used when the poller doesn’t have specific requirements on the exact times to poll.

Idlers

There are three types of idlers, IdleEnterer, Idler (proper) and IdleExiter, they are called, respectively, when the program is about to enter an idle state, when the program is idle and when the program is leaving an idle state. Idler enterers are usually a good place to update the program state. Proper idlers are the appropriate place to do heavy computational tasks thereby using what would otherwise be wasted CPU cycles. Exiters are the perfect place to do anything your program should do just before processing events (also timers, pollers, file descriptor handlers and animators)

Process Execution

The Exe class is used to spawn child processes in a full async fashion. Standard in/out/error of the child are available for communication using callbacks.

File descriptor handlers

File descriptor handlers allow you to monitor when there is data available to read on file descriptors, when writing will not block or if there was an error. Any valid file descriptor can be used with this API, regardless of if was gotten with an OS specific API or from ecore. see FdHandler

File monitor

Using the FileMonitor class you can monitor a directory for changes, a single calback will be called when events occur. Events will be generatd everytime a file or directory (that live in the give path) is created/deleted/modified.

File download

Ecore provide the FileDownload class to perform asyncronous download of files from the net. Two callbacks are used to inform the user while progress occurs and when the download has finished.

Ecore Con

The ecore_con module provide various utilities to perform different network related tasks. Everything provided in a fully async way. Most notable are the efl.ecore_con.Lookup class to perform DNS requests, the efl.ecore_con.Url class to perform HTTP requests and the efl.ecore_con.Server class to implement your own server.

Inheritance diagram

Inheritance diagram of efl.ecore