Lots of systems do not support multi-window on their own, consider standard Linux Frame Buffer (FB) or the PlayStation3. This makes it cumbersome as you’re restricted to a single window, likely you’ll have to rewrite your apps to behave well in this scenario.
Traditionally this problem is worked around by toolkits like Qt that provides QWS, a great help for developers. Considering QWS I decided to help our PS3 friends with something similar which I shamelessly called EWS (Ecore + Evas Single Process Windowing System).
Ecore and Evas already made 99% of this work: they abstract rendering, abstract windowing and so on. There is even support for “inlined windows” in Elementary, these are rendered to buffers that are visible inside other windows. Actually the first version of EWS was a 30min hack in Elementary called “eland” (making fun of wayland). But as not everyone would use Elementary it was better to move it lower in the stack: Ecore_Evas.
Ecore_Evas is a glue layer between Ecore and Evas that takes care to configure actual windows and setup Evas on them, to capture events from various sources and feed them to canvas, etc. If you cope with its API you’ll work with most EFL libraries and applications out-of-the-box.
Ecore_Evas_EWS was created as a new engine that builds on top of others. It will use a backing-store engine like X11, FB, DirectFB, WinCE or PS3 to create an internal Ecore_Evas. Every new window created with ecore_evas_ews_new() is rendered to an Evas using the buffer engine and its pixels end as the image source in the backing-store engine, displaying it. This is very similar to existing ecore_evas_buffer feature ecore_evas_object_image_new(), however it will handle more things automatically.
Among the new features are events to allow window management. Things like “window created”, “window moved” and “window resized” are placed in the main loop for interested peers, they may handle these and decorate the windows, offer window management (close, maximize, …). To exemplify that I’ve added support in Elementary with basic controls such as move, maximize, restore and close. Unfortunately it looks ugly like hell and then I’m not posting any screenshot or screencast 
Let’s wait for people doing themes to make a great work.
The work is far from complete, bugs remain, optimizations could be applied for OpenGL… if you consider the rules “20/80″, 80% of the code was written in 20% of the time, now we’ll take 80% to make it work for sure 
But it’s not bad considering it took me 2 days, 1421 lines in ecore_evas_ews.c, 543 in elu_ews_wm.c and 317 in ews.edc…
That’s why I keep saying that EFL is an amazing technology to build products. It runs fast, it’s slick and it does not get in the way. Give it a try! 
