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ANNOUNCING

eGenix.com mx Base Extension Package

Version 3.0.0

Open Source Python extensions providing important and useful services for Python programmers.

This announcement is also available on our web-site for online reading: http://www.egenix.com/company/news/eGenix-mx-Base-Distribution-3.0-GA.html

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ABOUT

The eGenix.com mx Base Extensions for Python are a collection of professional quality software tools which enhance Python's usability in many important areas such as fast text searching, date/time processing and high speed data types.

The tools have a proven record of being portable across many Unix and Windows platforms. You can write applications which use the tools on Windows and then run them on Unix platforms without change due to the consistent platform independent interfaces.

All available packages have proven their stability and usefulness in many mission critical applications and various commercial settings all around the world.

* About Python: Python is an object-oriented Open Source programming language which runs on all modern platforms (http://www.python.org/). By integrating ease-of-use, clarity in coding, enterprise application connectivity and rapid application design, Python establishes an ideal programming platform for todays IT challenges.

* About eGenix: eGenix is a consulting and software product company focused on providing professional quality services and products to Python users and developers (http://www.egenix.com/).

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NEWS

The 3.0 release of the eGenix mx Base Distributions comes with a huge number of enhancements, bug fixes and additions.

Some highlights:

* All mx Extensions have been ported to Python 2.5.

* mxDateTime has support for working with Python's datetime module types, so you can use and combine both if necessary. The parser was enhanced to support even more formats and make it more reliable than ever before.

* mxTextTools now fully supports Unicode, so you can parse Unicode data just as fast as you can 8-bit string data. The package also includes a tag table compiler and new jump target support to simplify working with tag tables.

* mxURL and mxUID were previously released as part of our mx Experimental distribution. They have now been integrated into the base distribution, providing easy-to-use data types for common tasks in web programming.

* We've switched from the old distutils wininst installer to the new MSI installer for the Windows Python 2.5 build. This gives you a lot more options for automatic installs, including unattended installs. See http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.5/msi/ for details.

For a more detailed description of changes, please see the respective package documentation on our web-site.

As always we are providing pre-compiled versions of the package for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris as well as sources which allow you to install the package on all other supported platforms.

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DOWNLOADS

The download archives and instructions for installing the packages can be found on the eGenix mx Base Distribution page:

http://www.egenix.com/products/python/mxBase/

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UPGRADING

Please note that the 2.0 series of the eGenix mx Base Distribution does not support Python 2.5 on 64-bit platforms due to the Py_ssize_t changes in the Python C API.

You are encouraged to upgrade to the new 3.0 series, if you plan to deploy on 64-bit platforms and use Python 2.5 as basis for your applications.

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LICENSES & COSTS

The eGenix mx Base package is distributed under the eGenix.com Public License which is a CNRI Python License style Open Source license. You can use the package in both commercial and non-commercial settings without fee or charge.

The package comes with full source code

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SUPPORT

Commercial support for these packages is available from eGenix.com. Please see

http://www.egenix.com/services/support/

for details about our support offerings.

Enjoy,