[ANN] The Enthought Tool Suite

[Prabhu Ramachandran]

Greetings,

This is to announce the *existence* of the Enthought Tool Suite (ETS).
ETS is a collection of several useful components that together provide
a powerful application framework with special emphasis on scientific
and engineering applications.  There are a large number of components,
some stable and some under heavy development.  These include:

 * Traits: (general purpose: stable)
   - Traits allow one to define special Python object attributes that 
     elegantly support initialization, validation, delegation, 
     notification and visualization (i.e. automatic generation of user 
     interfaces)

 * Endo: (general purpose: stable)
   - Endo is a Traits aware API documentation tool.

 * PyFace: (user interface: stable)
   - PyFace is a collection of Traits-based MVC components for wxPython.

 * Envisage: (general purpose: UNSTABLE)
   - Envisage is an extensible Traits-based application framework.
     It offers a plug-in based architecture similar to the Java Eclipse 
     framework.  While most of the existing plug-ins are stable, the overall 
     package itself, and the UI plug-in in particular, are still under heavy 
     development.

 * Kiva: (graphics: stable)
   - Kiva is a multi-platform Display PDF 2D drawing engine that
     supports multiple output backends, including wxWidgets on Windows,
     GTK, and Carbon, a variety of raster image formats, PDF, and
     Postscript.

 * Chaco: (plotting: being re-factored)
   - Chaco is a Python toolkit for producing interactive plotting
     applications. Chaco applications can range from simple line
     plotting scripts up to GUI applications for interactively
     exploring different aspects of interrelated data.  Chaco
     leverages other Enthought technologies such as Kiva, Enable, and
     Traits to produce highly interactive plots of publication
     quality.

 * TVTK: (graphics: stable)
   - TVTK is a Pythonic VTK wrapper for visualization, graphics and
     imaging in 2D/3D.  It transparently supports Traits and
     Numeric/numarray/scipy arrays.

 * MayaVi2: (scientific/engineering: semi-stable, unfinished)
   - MayaVi2 is an Envisage plug-in for 2D/3D scientific data
     visualization.  It is the next generation of the MayaVi
     scientific data visualizer.

These tools together form the Enthought Tool Suite (ETS).  ETS has
been under heavy development for the last year or two.  While some of
the tools are still under heavy development, many of them like Traits,
PyFace, Kiva, TVTK and others are stable enough for general use.

Enthought's enhanced Python distribution (Enthon) and installers for
several of the stable ETS components mentioned above are available
here:

   http://code.enthought.com/

The source code is released under a BSD-like license.  Up-to-date
installers for the ETS are on their way and will be announced when
ready.

Those who are interested in the components that are still under
development should check out the SVN repository (a fresh working copy
is likely to occupy about 250MB).

Trac interface (Wiki, code, issue tracker):
   http://www.enthought.com/enthought

Build instructions:
   http://www.enthought.com/enthought/wiki/GrabbingAndBuilding

Mailing list:
   http://mail.enthought.com/mailman/listinfo/envisage-dev

ETS is developed and funded by Enthought, Inc., Austin, TX.

Enjoy using the Enthought Tool Suite!

Cheers,
The Enthought Tool Suite Team