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Enaml is not a Markup Language

Enaml is Not A Markup Language. Enaml is a library for creating professional quality user interfaces with minimal effort. Enaml combines a domain specific declarative language with a constraints based layout system to allow users to easily define rich UIs with complex and flexible layouts. Enaml applications can transparently run on multiple backends (Qt and Wx) and on multiple operating systems (Windows, OSX, Linux).

Other great Enaml features include

  1. Declarative UI specification langauge that is a strict superset of Python
  2. Architecture design which encourages Model View separation
  3. Subscription based operators which allow state and events to freely flow between models and views
  4. Ability to easily subclass widgets to override functionality of builtin widgets
  5. Support for custom UI widgets
  6. Class based widget design encourages re-use of UI code
  7. Well documented code base that is easy to understand

Enaml is heavily inspired by Qt's QML system, but Enaml uses native widgets (as opposed to drawing on a 2D canvas) and is toolkit independent. Currently supported/in-development toolkits include Qt4 and Wx. The Qt toolkit is strongly recommended over Wx.

Enaml is extensible and makes it extremely easy for the user to define their own widgets, override existing widgets, create a new backend toolkit, or even hook the runtime to apply their own expression dependency behavior. About the only thing not hookable is the Enaml language syntax itself.

The enamldoc package provides a Sphinx extension for documenting Enaml objects.

Prerequisites

  • Python >= 2.6 (not Python 3)
  • Traits
  • Casuarius (https://github.com/enthought/casuarius)
  • PySide or PyQt4 (only if using the Qt backend)
  • wxPython (only if using the wx backend)
  • PLY (Python Lex-Yacc), for parsing .enaml files
  • Sphinx (only if building the docs)