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Introducing EmPresent

Provided by: HCL India

Embedded systems are becoming more complex and commonly include graphic displays for a rich user experience. In fact, the standard T-Engine includes a Quarter VGA (320×240) graphic display. Today, T-Engine developers can either write their own code or use tools such as WideStudio and T-Shell for the development of graphical user interfaces. In a similar vein, EmPresent is a tool from HCL that enables the creation of user interfaces for a large number of operating systems including the T-Engine. This article, sent to TE@Onghu by HCL, provides a brief introduction to the main features of EmPresent.

Background

Embedded devices are quickly adopting graphical displays and user information displays enriching the user experience and easing the usage. Embedded application developers face the challenge of developing these user interfaces, with constantly changing platforms.

About EmPresent

  • A smart GUI toolkit with powerful Visual Editor for faster and parallel development of GUI with rich set of widgets to build a powerful embedded multilingual Graphical User Interface (GUI), giving independence from platforms to embedded application developers.
  • EmPresent is small, stable and has a scalable Windowing System specifically optimized and designed for embedded devices. Its Complementary Integrated Development Environment provides quick & faster prototyping and platform specific code generation which empowers RTOS vendors and embedded application developers with time-to-market advantage.
  • Available on multiple processors like ARM, MIPS and SH etc. and embedded OS like Embedded T-Engine, Linux, WinCE, iTRON (NORTi, PrKernel), etc. EmPresent event driven architecture delivers a small footprint for embedded Windowing System. EmPresent Free Evaluation Kit gives you a desktop-based simulation environment for developing GUI of your embedded application.
  • Provision for 3rd party embedded Software (embedded Database, embedded Fonts, etc) integration to give a unified interface to the Application Developer

Main Features

  • EmPresent provides a desktop based simulation environment which allows the embedded application developer to visualize and test the application even when the hardware is not ready.
  • Easy and Quick Prototyping Its desktop-based Integrated Development Environment facilitates generation of platform specific C code. The visual editor, which runs on a Win 32 environment, enables easy prototyping.
  • Supports multi byte character set for languages such as English, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
  • Full Color Support It provides Full Color Support from 256 colors to 64K colors depending upon the display controller capabilities.
  • EmPresent supports all True Type Fonts (TTF) such as Arial, Courier, Times New Roman in English and MSMincho, MSGothic, Kandata, Shinonome in Japanese. These fonts can be downloaded to the target in the form Bitmap.
  • Highly Configurable and Scalable/Small Footprint Windowing System EmPresent enables development of embedded applications with windowing capabilities. A windows manager, widget manager and font manager provides excellent windowing capabilities. The windowing system is highly modular so that minimum footprint size can be achieved with appropriate selection of widgets.
  • The GUI development toolkit is provided for development on a desktop environment with automated code generation. The generated code can run on embedded platforms with no changes. This gives developers the ability to design the application once and then port it to all target devices.
  • Image Codecs Support Supports image formats like: BMP, GIF, JPEG, TIFF and PNG.

Some Screenshots/ Pictures