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<div class="section" id="introduction">
<h1>Introduction<a class="headerlink" href="#introduction" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h1>
<p>Welcome to the Envisage Project! The goal of the project is to provide a
framework for building extensible, pluggable applications, and in particular
(but not limited to!), extensible, pluggable applications for scientists and
engineers.</p>
<p>The project is really divided into 3 sub-projects:-</p>
<ol class="arabic">
<li><p class="first"><a class="reference external" href="core.html">Core</a></p>
<p>The Envisage Core, found in the top-level <a class="reference external" href="https://svn.enthought.com/enthought/browser/EnvisageCore/trunk/enthought/envisage/api.py">envisage</a> package,
defines the basic application architecture including the plugin and
extension mechanisms. All of the other sub-projects are simply collections
of plugins that are built on top of the core.</p>
</li>
<li><p class="first">User Interface (UI)</p>
<p>This is small (but hopefully expanding) set of plugins useful for building
applications with (graphical) User Interfaces. It is found in the
<em>envisage.ui</em> package (and its subpackages), and aims to provide
functionality commonly required in this type of application including
actions, menubars, toolbars, user preferences, wizards etc. One of the most
useful plugins in this project is the <a class="reference external" href="Workbench.html">Workbench</a> plugin (found in the
<a class="reference external" href="https://svn.enthought.com/enthought/browser/EnvisagePlugins/trunk/enthought/envisage/ui/workbench/api.py">envisage.ui.workbench</a> package) that helps you build a style of
user interface that is often (but not exclusively) found in integrated
development environments (IDEs).</p>
</li>
<li><p class="first">Science/Enginneering</p>
<p>This is the holy grail, and in truth, we haven’t got much here yet, but the
goal is to build up a set of plugins targeted towards scientific and
engineering applications (data import/export, 2D/3D visualization etc).</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Before you read any further, we should point out that Envisage is based
<em>heavily</em> on the excellent work that has been done in the Java community on
frameworks such as <a class="reference external" href="http://www.osgi.org">OSGi</a>, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.eclipse.org">Eclipse</a> (which is built on top of its own <a class="reference external" href="http://www.osgi.org">OSGi</a>
implementation) and <a class="reference external" href="http://www.netbeans.org">NetBeans</a>. Like these other frameworks, Envisage helps you
build applications that are based on the concept of plugins. However, one of
the main goals is to provide a simplified system so that applications and
plugins can be written by scientists, engineers, and those people whose
full-time job is <em>not</em> necessarily software development, hence a lot of work
has gone into trying to satify the old adage of “make simple things simple, and
complex things possible”. It will obviously be up to you to judge if we
succeeded!</p>
<div class="section" id="getting-started">
<h2>Getting Started<a class="headerlink" href="#getting-started" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>The best way to get started is probably to take the time to read and digest the
<a class="reference external" href="core.html">Core</a> documentation and then work through the <a class="reference external" href="https://svn.enthought.com/enthought/browser/EnvisageCore/trunk/examples/Hello%20World/hello_world.py">Hello World</a> and
<a class="reference external" href="MessageOfTheDay.html">Message of the Day</a> examples. Despite being extremely simple, the examples
introduces you to <em>all</em> of the fundamental concepts of Envisage, and the <em>real</em>
applications that you build (which will hopefully be a lot more useful) will be
built in exactly the same way.</p>
<p>For definitions of the terminology used in Envisage, see the <a class="reference external" href="Glossary.html">Glossary</a>
(although it will probably make more sense after going through the other
documentation and examples first).</p>
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<h3><a href="../index.html">Table Of Contents</a></h3>
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<li><a class="reference internal" href="#">Introduction</a><ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#getting-started">Getting Started</a></li>
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