________________________________________________________________________ ANNOUNCING: eGenix.com mx BASE Extension Package for Python Version 2.0.2 Open Source Python extensions providing important and useful services for Python programmers. ________________________________________________________________________ WHAT IS IT ?: 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 datatypes. Python is an open-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. The tools have a proven record of being portable across many Unix and Windows platforms, e.g. you can write applications which use the tools on Windows and then run them on Unix platforms without change due to the consistent platforms independent interfaces. All available packages have proven their stability and usefulness in many mission critical applications and various commercial settings all around the world. ________________________________________________________________________ WHAT'S NEW ? The RPM packaging scheme was reworked, Cygwin support was added and a few subpackages were updated to better support Python 2.1's new coercion mechanism. As always we are providing precompiled versions of the package for Windows and Linux as well as sources which allow you to install the package on all other supported platforms. ________________________________________________________________________ EGENIX.COM MX BASE PACKAGE OVERVIEW: mxDateTime - Generic Date/Time Types mxDateTime is an extension package that provides three new object types, DateTime, DateTimeDelta and RelativeDateTime, which let you store and handle date/time values in a much more natural way than by using ticks (seconds since 1.1.70 0:00 UTC; the encoding used by the time module). You can add, subtract and even multiply instances, pickle and copy them and convert the results to strings, COM dates, ticks and some other more esoteric values. In addition, there are several convenient constructors and formatters at hand to greatly simplify dealing with dates and times in real-world applications. In addition to providing an easy-to-use Python interface the package also exports a comfortable C API interface for other extensions to build upon. This is especially interesting for database applications which often have to deal with date/time values (the mxODBC package is one example of an extension using this interface). mxTextTools - Fast Text Processing Tools mxTextTools is an extension package for Python that provides several useful functions and types that implement high-performance text manipulation and searching algorithms in addition to a very flexible and extendable state machine, the Tagging Engine, that allows scanning and processing text based on low-level byte-code "programs" written using Python tuples. It gives you access to the speed of C without the need to do any compile and link steps every time you change the parsing description. Applications include parsing structured text, finding and extracting text (either exact or using translation tables) and recombining strings to form new text. mxStack - Fast and Memory-Efficient Stack Type mxStack is an extension package that provides a new object type called Stack. It works much like what you would expect from such a type, having .push() and .pop() methods and focusses on obtaining maximum speed at low memory costs. mxTools - Collection of Additional Builtins mxTools is an extension package that includes a collection of handy functions and objects giving additional functionality in form of new builtins to the Python programmer. The package auto-installs the new functions and objects as builtins upon first import. This means that they become instantely available to all other modules without any further action on your part. Add the line import NewBuiltins to your site.py script and they will be available to all users at your site as if they were installed in the Python interpreter itself. mxProxy - Generic Proxy Wrapper Type mxProxy is an extension package that provides a new type that is suitable to implement Bastion like features without the need to use restricted execution environments. The type's main features are secure data encapsulation (the hidden objects are not accessible from Python since they are stored in internal C structures), customizable attribute lookup methods and a cleanup protocol that helps in breaking circular references prior to object deletion. The latest version adds a very interesting new feature: weak references which help you work with circular references in a way that doesn't cause memory leakage in a Python system. Note that even though Python 2.1 has its own weak reference implemetation, this package can be used to write applications which also work on Python 1.5.2 and 2.0. mxBeeBase - On-disk B+Tree Based Database Kit mxBeeBase is a high performance construction kit for disk based indexed databases. It offers components which you can plug together to easily build your own custom mid-sized databases (the current size limit is <CODE>sizeof(long)</CODE> which gives you an address range of around 2GB on 32-bit platforms). The two basic building blocks in mxBeeBase are storage and index. Storage is implemented as variable record length data storage with integrated data protection features, automatic data recovery and locking for multi process access. Indexes use a high performance optimized B+Tree implementation built on top of Thomas Niemann's Cookbook B+Tree implementation (http://epaperpress.com/). ________________________________________________________________________ WHERE CAN I GET IT ? The download archives and instructions for installing the packages can be found at: http://www.lemburg.com/files/python/ ________________________________________________________________________ WHAT DOES IT COST ? The BASE packages come with a Python 2.0 style license, which means that you can use them in both commercial and non-commercial settings without fee or charge. All packages come with full source code. ________________________________________________________________________ WHERE CAN I GET SUPPORT ? Commercial quality support for these packages is available from eGenix.com Software GmbH. Please see http://www.lemburg.com/files/python/eGenix-mx-Extensions.html#Support for details about the eGenix support offerings. ________________________________________________________________________ REFERENCE: <P><A HREF="http://www.lemburg.com/files/python/">eGenix.com mx BASE Extension Package 2.0.2</A> - eGenix.com mx BASE Extension Package 2.0.2 with precompiled binaries for Windows and Linux. (12-Jul-2001) ________________________________________________________________________ Enjoy, -- Marc-Andre Lemburg CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH ______________________________________________________________________ Company & Consulting: http://www.egenix.com/ Python Software: http://www.lemburg.com/python/