[SciPy-User] [ANN] Release of ETS 4.4: Traits, Chaco, and more...

Mon Dec 16 20:46:53 EST 2013

[Apologies for the cross-post]

Dear fellow developers,

Enthought is pleased to announce the release of multiple major projects of
ETS:

- Traits 4.4.0,

 - Chaco 4.4.1,

- TraitsUI 4.4.0,

- Envisage 4.4.0,

- Pyface 4.4.0,

 - Codetools 4.2.0,

- ETS 4.4.1

These packages are at the core of the Enthought Tool Suite (ETS,
http://code.enthought.com/projects), a collection of free, open-source
components developed by Enthought and our partners to construct custom
scientific applications. ETS includes a wide variety of components,
including:

   -

   an extensible application framework (Envisage)
   -

   application building blocks (Traits, TraitsUI, Enaml, Pyface, Codetools)
   -

   2-D and 3-D graphics libraries (Chaco, Mayavi, Enable)
   -

   scientific and math libraries (Scimath)
   -

   developer tools (Apptools)

You can install any of these packages from
Canopy<https://www.enthought.com/products/canopy/>'s
package manager, Canopy <https://www.enthought.com/products/canopy/>'s (or
EPD’s) enpkg command, PyPI <https://pypi.python.org/pypi> (using pip or
easy_install), , or build them from source code on
github<https://github.com/enthought/ets>.
For more details about installation, see the ETS intallation
page<http://code.enthought.com/downloads/>.

*Contributors*

===========

This set of releases was an 9-month effort of all Enthought developers as
well as:
- Yves Delley

- Pieter Aarnoutse

- Jordan Ilott

- Matthieu Dartiailh

- Ian Delaney

- Gregor Thalhammer

Many thanks to them!

*General release notes*

===================

   1.

   The major new feature in this Traits release is a new adaptation
   mechanism in the ``traits.adaptation`` package.  The new mechanism is
   intended to replace the older traits.protocols package.  Code written
   against ``traits.protocols`` will continue to work, although the
   ``traits.protocols`` API has been deprecated, and a warning will be logged
   on first use of ``traits.protocols``.  See the 'Advanced Topics' section
   of the user manual for more
details<http://docs.enthought.com/traits/traits_user_manual/advanced.html#adaptation>
   .
   2.

   These new releases of TraitsUI, Envisage, Pyface and Codetools include
   an update to this new adaptation mechanism.
   3.

   All ETS projects are now on TravisCI, making it easier to contribute to
   them.
   4.

   As of this release, the only Python versions that are actively supported
   are 2.6 and 2.7. As we are moving toward future-proofing ETS, more code
   that supported Python 2.5 will be removed in the coming months.
   5.

   We will retire chaco-users at enthought.com since it is lightly used and
   are now recommending all Chaco users to send questions, requests and
   comments to enthought-dev at enthought.com or to StackOverflow (tag
   "enthought" and possibly "chaco").

More details about the release of each project are given below. Please see
the CHANGES.txt file inside each project for full details of the changes.

Happy coding!
The ETS developers

*Specific release notes*

===================

Traits 4.4.0 release notes

---------------------------------

The Traits library enhances Python by adding optional type-checking and an

event notification system, making it an ideal platform for writing
data-driven

applications.  It forms the foundation of the Enthought Tool Suite.

In addition to the above-mentioned rework of the adaptation mechanism, the
release also includes improved support for using Cython with `HasTraits`

classes, some new helper utilities for writing unit tests for Traits events,

and a variety of bug fixes, stability enhancements, and internal code

improvements.

Chaco 4.4.1 release notes

-----------------------------------

Chaco is a Python package for building efficient, interactive and custom
2-D plots and visualizations. While Chaco generates attractive static
plots, it works particularly well for interactive data visualization and
exploration.

This release introduces many improvements and bug fixes, including fixes to
the generation of image files from plots, improvements to the ArrayPlotData
to change multiple arrays at a time, and improvements to multiple elements
of the plots such as tick labels and text overlays.

TraitsUI 4.4.0 release notes

------------------------------------

The TraitsUI project contains a toolkit-independent GUI abstraction layer,
which is used to support the "visualization" features of the Traits
package. TraitsUI allows developers to write against the TraitsUI API
(views, items, editors, etc.), and let TraitsUI and the selected toolkit
and back-end take care of the details of displaying them.

In addition to the above-mentioned update to the new Traits 4.4.0
adaptation mechanism, there have also been a number of improvements to drag
and drop support for the Qt backend and some modernization of the use of
WxPython to support Wx 2.9.  This release also includes a number of
bug-fixes and minor functionality enhancements.

Envisage 4.4.0 release notes

--------------------------------------

Envisage is a Python-based framework for building extensible applications,

providing a standard mechanism for features to be added to an

application, whether by the original developer or by someone else.

In addition to the above-mentioned update to the new Traits 4.4.0
adaptation mechanism, this release also adds a new method to retrieve a
service that is

required by the application and provides documentation and test updates.

Pyface 4.4.0 release notes

-----------------------------------

The pyface project provides a toolkit-independent library of Traits-aware
widgets and GUI components, which are used to support the "visualization"
features of Traits.

The biggest change in this release is support for the new adaptation
mechanism in Traits 4.4.0. This release also includes Tasks support for
Enaml 0.8 and a number of other minor changes, improvements and bug-fixes.

Codetools release notes

-------------------------------

The codetools project includes packages that simplify meta-programming and
help the programmer separate data from code in Python. This library
provides classes for performing dependency-analysis on blocks of Python
code, and Traits-enhanced execution contexts that can be used as execution
namespaces.

In addition to the above-mentioned update to the new Traits 4.4.0
adaptation mechanism, this release also includes a number of modernizations
of the code base, including the consistent use of absolute imports, and a
new execution manager for deferring events from Contexts.

-- 
Jonathan Rocher, PhD
Scientific software developer
Enthought, Inc.
jrocher at enthought.com
1-512-536-1057
http://www.enthought.com
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