Glossary
The following table defines some basic terminology used in Tizen.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
.edc file |
EDC (Edje Data Collection) file is a text script file that contains the code describing the position, size, and other parameters of graphical elements that compose the visual aspect of the Tizen native application. Using the Edje library tools, an EDC file must be compiled into a .edj file, which is a UI layout binary. |
.edj file |
Package file for Tizen native application themes (Edje). |
.tpk file |
TPK (tizen package) file is a package file for Tizen native applications. It contains the tizen-manifest.xml file that defines the package attributes. A TPK package can contain multiple Tizen native applications.Related terms: Native application |
.wgt file |
Package file for Tizen Web applications. A WGT package contains the config.xml file that defines the Web application attributes. The format of the WGT package is based on the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) widgets standard.Related terms: Web application |
| Access token | Security credentials for a login session. They identify the user, the user’s groups and privileges, and, in some cases, a particular application. |
| Actor (in DALi) | Primary object that composes the entire scene and interacts in DALi applications. Actors are effective nodes that receive input (such as touch events) and act as a container for drawable elements and other actors. A DALi application uses a hierarchy of actor objects to position visible content. An actor inherits a position relative to its parent, and can be moved relative to this point. UI components can be built by combining multiple actors. |
| Author certificate | Developer signs an application package with their author certificate and signing key to specify who developed the application. The result of the signing is an author signature.Related terms: Tizen certificate |
| Author signature | Author signature specifies which entity alleges to have authored the package, that the integrity of the package is as the author intended, and whether a set of packages came from the same author. |
| Cairo | Open source library for 2D vector graphics with support for multiple output devices. In Tizen, Cairo can support output to 2 different backends: the image and GL backend. |
| config.xml | File that contains the Web application package information. It defines all the information about the package and applications in it. |
| DALi | DALi (Dynamic Animation Library) is a cross-platform 3D UI toolkit for embedded systems. Its 3D user interface engine enables you to create rich and high-performance UI applications. DALi is based on OpenGL ES 2.0, but provides a clean cross-platform C++ framework. This means that you can use high-level DALi APIs instead of accessing low-level OpenGL APIs directly.Related terms: OpenGL ES |
| Distributor certificate | Distributor, such as the Tizen Store, signs an application package with its distributor certificate and signing key to specify who distributes the application. The result of the signing is a distributor signature.Related terms: Tizen certificate |
| Distributor signature | Distributor signature specifies that a particular distributor has distributed a package, that the integrity of the package is as the distributor intended, and whether a set of packages came from the same distributor. |
| DUID | DUID (Device Unique ID) is assigned to the device by a device vendor. Based on the DUID, a vendor-specific test distributor certificate is generated. |
| EFL | Tizen platform provides EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) as one of the native UI toolkit frameworks for developing a native application. EFL is a collection of libraries that are independent or can build on top of each other to provide useful features that complement the OS’s existing environment, rather than wrap and abstract it, trying to be their own environment and OS in its entirety. This means that EFL expects you to use other system libraries and APIs in conjunction with EFL libraries to provide a whole working application or library. Simply use EFL as a set of convenient pre-made libraries to accomplish many complex or painful tasks. |
| EGL | EGL™ (Embedded-System Graphics Library) is an interface between rendering APIs, such as OpenGL ES, and the underlying native platform window system. It handles graphic context management, surface/buffer binding, and rendering synchronization, and enables high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering using other APIs. |
| Elementary UI components | Elementary library is a set of fast, finger-friendly, scalable, and themeable UI component libraries. It provides several UI components that can be used to compose the user interface of Tizen native applications.Originally, the Elementary was developed as part of the Window manager development on desktop devices. For the mobile and wearable profile, Tizen platform reused the proper UI components and created new ones, and then enhanced the adjusted all of them for Tizen native applications. |
| Elm_GLView | The easiest way to use the OpenGL ES API in a Tizen application is to rely on the Elm_GLView component. The Elm_GLView component is one of the Elementary UI components, which creates an OpenGL ES (GL) target surface and a context. The Elm_GLView component can be embedded in any Tizen UI application. It is basically a wrapper of Evas_GL, the GL/EGL abstraction layer of EFL. By using the Elm_GLView component, you avoid having to consider how EGL environment is coupled with the native windowing systems.Related terms: OpenGL ES, Evas, EGL, EFL |
| EOS | EOS (End Of Stream) is a condition where no more data can be read from the stream. |
| Evas | Canvas engine responsible for managing the drawing of your content. All graphical objects that you create are Evas objects. Evas handles the entire window state by filling the canvas with objects and manipulating their states. In contrast to other canvas libraries, such as Cairo, OpenGL, and XRender, Evas is not a drawing library, but a scene graph library that retains the state of all objects.The Evas concept is explained in Evas Rendering Concept and Method. Evas objects are created and then manipulated until they are no longer needed, at which point they are deleted. This allows you to work in the same terms than a designer thinks in: it is a direct mapping, as opposed to having to convert the concepts into drawing commands in the right order, and calculate the minimum drawing calls needed to get the job done. |
| EXIF | EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) is a format used for images, sound, and tags in digital still cameras and other systems handling the image and sound files recorded by digital still cameras. |
| GDB | GDB (GNU Debugger) is the most popular debugger for UNIX systems to debug C and C++ programs. |
| Home screen | Main user interface on a device or operating system where the user can access a set of functions or applications available on the device. |
| Hybrid Web application | Tizen supports a WGT package that contains 1 Web application and multiple native service or widget applications. When you want to develop a Web application and also use powerful Tizen native APIs, you can develop a Web application and separate native service and widget applications, and package them all to a WGT package. |
| Layout | Container component that takes a standard Edje design file and wraps it very thinly in a UI component. Unlike other container components, which have predefined layouts, the layout component enables you to define the look and feel of the UI with animation and basic event response. |
| Media packet | AV packet buffer for interworking between multimedia framework modules. |
| Native API | Tizen Native API is a set of carefully selected and tightly managed APIs from the Tizen native subsystems. The Tizen Native API Specification available in the Tizen SDK shows a full list of the selected native subsystem APIs. The Native API is divided into dozens of API modules; each module represents a set of logically similar submodule APIs, which can be grouped into the same category. |
| Native application | Native application is developed using C/C++ and can use Tizen Native APIs. Usually, native applications can be developed using EFL or DALi to draw something to the screen. The Tizen Native API supports more advanced device-specific features, such as camera, GPS, and accelerometer, in addition to more advanced system settings and functionality.Related terms: EFL, DALi |
| OAuth | The OAuth 2.0 authorization framework enables a third-party application to obtain limited access to an HTTP service, either on behalf of a resource owner by orchestrating an approval interaction between the resource owner and the HTTP service, or by allowing the third-party application to obtain access on its own behalf. |
| OpenGL ES | OpenGL ES (Open Graphics Library embedded systems) is an interface to the GPU that consists of well-defined subsets of the desktop OpenGL API. Tizen native applications can use OpenGL ES not only for creating a 3D scene, but also for a 2D scene that requires fast interaction. OpenGL ES is also good for improving performance and reducing power consumption when the native application performs computation-intensive tasks that can be run in parallel. |
| Pbuffer surface | Pbuffers are typically allocated in off-screen (non-visible) graphics memory and intended only for accelerated off-screen rendering. For that, Evas_GL can support the creation of the pbuffer surface.Related terms: Evas |
| Privilege | Tizen provides API-level access control for security-sensitive operations which, if not used correctly, can harm user privacy and system stability. Therefore, applications that use such sensitive APIs must declare the required privileges in the tizen-manifest.xml or config.xml file.Privileges have a level according to their hierarchy. The public level is the minimum privilege level, and any application developed by using the SDK can use these privileges. The platform level is the highest privilege level, and an application that needs theses privileges requires a platform-signed certificate.Related terms: tizen-manifest.xml file |
| Push notification | Push notification is a message received from an application server through the push server. Once the application server sends a notification to the Tizen push server, the server forwards the notification to the destination device, and the push service (daemon) of the device delivers it to the application. Based on the selected option, the user can be notified by an alert message in the notification bar, or the application can be launched upon the arrival of the notification. |
| Push service | Tizen push service is used to provide push notifications for messages or updates for services. The push service can also refer to the push daemon itself running in the Tizen framework. |
| SDB | SDB (Smart Development Bridge) is a command line tool for emulator and device management. It acts as an intermediary between a device and your development system, and provides various device management capabilities, such as moving and syncing files to the emulator, or running a UNIX shell on the device or emulator. |
| Service application | Service application does not have a UI and runs in the background. It can support background jobs for a application that has a UI. Usually, it needs to be packaged with a native UI application. |
| SMACK | SMACK (Simplified Mandatory Access Control in Kernel) is one of the Mandatory Access Control (MAC) mechanisms available in the Linux kernel since 2.6.25. SMACK is designated as the access control mechanism for Tizen out of many technologies, such as SELINUX, TOMOYO and APPARMOR, because of the simplicity and ease of use.SMACK defines 3 components: subject, object, and access type. The subject represents the domain of the process, and the object represents the domain of the resource (such as file, process, IPC, or network), which the process tries to access. The access type is the parameter of the operation that the subject wants to perform with the object, for example, read, write, or execute. |
| Stage | Top-level node of the scene graph used for displaying a tree of actors. To display an actor, add it to the stage.Related terms: Actor |
| STT | STT (speech-to-text) features enable recognizing sound data recorded by the user and sending the result as text. When your application creates a handle and prepares the STT service with the API, the STT daemon is invoked and connected for background work. This daemon and your application communicate as the server and the client. |
| Surface | Object holding pixels that are being composited to the screen.There are 2 kind of surfaces: main surface and sub-surface. A main surface with its sub-surfaces forms a (compound) window. For window management purposes, this set of surface objects is to be considered as a single window, and it must also behave as such. The aim of sub-surfaces is to offload some of the compositing work within a window from clients to the compositor. A prime example is a video player with decorations and video in separate surface objects. This allows the compositor to pass YUV video buffer processing to dedicated overlay hardware, when possible. |
| Sync Manager | Sync Manager provides notifications for a service application to maintain data consistency between a server and the device. You can manage the synchronization schedule for applications. |
| TAU | TAU (Tizen Advanced UI) is a touch-optimized Web UI framework to create a Web application that runs on a wide variety of Tizen devices. It contains well-defined and efficient UI components, templates, and samples. In wearable devices especially, TAU provides a way to make a single application support multiple display shapes, such as square, rectangular, and circular. |
| TBM | TBM (Tizen Buffer Manager) provides a mechanism for allocating graphic buffers rendering images on Tizen. |
| Tizen certificate | Before you run the application, you must sign your application package by generating a Tizen certificate and registering it in the IDE. The Tizen certificate consists of an author and distributor certificate.The Tizen certificate can be generated by creating a new profile in the IDE. For commercial devices, the Tizen certificate can be issued by a device vendor.Related terms: Author certificate, Distributor certificate |
| tizen-manifest.xml | File that contains the native application package information. It defines all the information about the package and applications in it. |
| TTS | TTS (text-to-speech) features include synthesizing text into sound data as utterances and playing them. It is also possible to pause and stop playing. When your application creates a handle and prepares the TTS service with the API, the TTS daemon is invoked and connected for background work. This daemon and your application communicate as the server and the client. |
| UI components | UI components allow you to build a Tizen native application without having to reinvent basic objects, such as buttons, lists, or text entries. |
| UI container | EFL supports building layouts in the form of Elementary UI components. Those UI components are classified as containers. Elementary provides a set of UI containers which enable displaying UI components in an organized layout.Note that container UI components do not have their own visual identity. They only have logical structures for assignment or placement of the UI components. |
| vCalendar/iCalendar | Computer file format, which allows Internet users to send meeting requests and tasks to other Internet users through email or by sharing files with an extension of .vcs/.ics.iCalendar design is based on the previous file format, vCalendar, created by the IMC (Internet Mail Consortium). |
| vCard | File format standard for electronic business cards. It can contain name and address information, telephone numbers, email addresses, URLs, logos, photographs, and audio clips. |
| Voice control | Voice control features allow the user to control the device through voice commands. This feature is supported in mobile applications only.The Voice control API enables you to register voice commands, which trigger a callback when the user speaks them. The Voice control elementary API enables you to register voice commands for EFL-supported UI components to perform component-related actions, such as button clicks. |
| Wayland | Wayland window system is a windowing system based on the wayland protocol, which is both a protocol where a compositor talks to its clients, and a C library implementation of that protocol. The compositor can be a standalone display server running on the Linux kernel mode setting and evdev input devices, an X application, or a Wayland client itself. |
| Web application | Web application comprises HTML, JavaScript, and CSS combined in a package, which can be installed on the Tizen device. A Web application package includes all the support files that are needed by the Web application. Therefore, a Web application can run without any additional external resources or network connectivity after the installation.The application model supports a rich set of standard W3C/HTML5 features, which include various JavaScript APIs as well as additional HTML markups and CSS features. These features along with the Tizen Device APIs and UI framework support can be used to create rich Web applications in a variety of categories, such as contact, messaging, device information access, multimedia, graphics, and games. |
| Web Device API | Tizen Web Device API, based on JavaScript, provides you advanced access to the device platform capabilities.You can develop rich Web applications using the Tizen Web Device APIs. You can, for example, control the application life-cycle, manage your schedules, exchange data, or make payments using NFC. |
| Widget application | Tizen application that can be shown on the home screen as a widget. Usually, widget applications are launched by the home screen when the user selects them in the Add Widget menu.Widget applications are useful to provide simple information or control to users, because users can see the widget on the home screen without launching the application explicitly. |
| Window UI component | Bottom-most UI component in a Tizen native application. Basically, the way to build a Tizen native application is to add a window and set content in it. Window UI components are provided by the Elementary library, which is a high-level wrapper on the top-most layer. |
| X Window | X Window System (X11, or shortened to simply X, and sometimes informally X-Windows) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on UNIX-like computer operating systems. |
| YUV | YUV color model represents the human perception of color more closely than the standard RGB model used in computer graphics hardware. In YUV, Y is the luminance (brightness) component, while U and V are the chrominance (color) components. |