General Info

The Canvas will probably be named "Shadecanvas". Is is implemented independently from Gtk and Glib and supports at least Cairo as a rendering backend, but in the long term it may also implement others. Shadecanvas is licensed under the terms and conditions of the LGPL.

Components

For ease of development this document will break the canvas down into several aspects that generally can be discussed independently:

• CanvasItems - The canvas, a composite design pattern.
• CanvasBackend - the low level rendering backend.
• CanvasOperations - A wrapper around the backend providing a highly convenient API for the client.
• CanvasLayout - Layout containers and strategies provided to the client for aligning items in the canvas.
• CanvasValueObjects - Value objects, such as a color.
• CanvasSignalling - The signal/event mechanism.
• CanvasRefCounting - The reference counting implementation.
• OtherCanvasObjects - All objects that do not fit in any of the above catgories.