DirectFB's Ilixi Fast & Featureful Toolkit Reached v1.0

Ilixi is a tool-kit designed around the DirectFB environment that is very lightweight, supports key and pointer navigation, provides event-driven widgets, aims to be very fast, and is designed for use atop only DirectFB. Ilixi has picked up many features this year and it's now deemed production ready.

The Ilixi v1.0 release happened just over one month ago (30 August), but there was no news passed along from that camp nor did it seem to catch any other mainstream attention; I only happened to stumble across the 1.0 release when seeing if there was anything new within DirectFB. Ilixi is a tool-kit for DirectFB that we last talked about in 2012 with A Crazy Demo Showing The Ilixi Compositor In DirectFB 1.6.

Since last writing about Ilixi on Phoronix, the open-source project has experienced updates to its rendering stack and its look-in-feel, a platform manager, i18n support via gettext, sound effects, 2D transformations, font caching and fontconfig support, input helper, and many other new features. Interestingly, in the name of performance they dropped the common Cairo library for rendering widgets and are just blitting to the screen.

With the Ilixi 1.0.0 tagging they feel their UI tool-kit for DirectFB is now quite optimized and considered "production ready" by its developers. Ilixi is primarily targeting embedded systems running DirectFB, but it's even received a WebKit engine port, etc.

More details on this work can be found at Ilixi.org and DirectFB.org. For those curious about Ilixi's look-and-feel and what the tool-kit is capable of, embedded below is a sample done by the DirectFB developers.