ANNOUNCE: wxPython 2.9.3.0 (classic)

[Robin Dunn]

Announcing
----------

wxPython 2.9.3.0 (classic) has been released and is now available for
download at http://wxpython.org/download.php.  Among other things,
this build adds some classes produced by one of the Google Summer of
Code projects, wx.html2.WebView and related classes.  This gives
wxPython the ability to embed a native HTML/CSS/JS renderer using the
same API and events on all platforms.  More details are below.

Various binaries are available for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows, and also
for OSX using the Carbon and Cocoa APIs, for Python 2.6 and 2.7.
Source code is also available at http://wxpython.org/download.php of
course, for building your own.


What is wxPython?
-----------------

wxPython is a GUI toolkit for the Python programming language. It
allows Python programmers to create programs with a robust, highly
functional graphical user interface, simply and easily. It is
implemented as a set of Python extension modules that wrap the GUI
components of the popular wxWidgets cross platform library, which is
written in C++.

wxPython is a cross-platform toolkit. This means that the same program
will usually run on multiple platforms without modifications.
Currently supported platforms are 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows,
most Linux or other Unix-like systems using GTK2, and Mac OS X 10.4+.
In most cases the native widgets are used on each platform to provide
a 100% native look and feel for the application.


Major changes in 2.9.3.0
------------------------

wx.ListCtrl:  Added a static method named HasColumnOrderSupport which
returns a boolen value indicating if the column ordering APIs (see
next item) are implemented for the current platform.

Added methods for querying and manipulating the ordering of the
columns (in wx.LC_REPORT mode only.)  This is not implemented on all
platforms so use HasColumnOrderSupport to find out if the APIs are
supported.  The new APIs are: GetColumnOrder, GetColumnIndexFromOrder,
GetColumnsOrder and SetColumnsOrder.

Added wrappers for new WebView classes which came from a successful
Google Summer of Code project this year.  This new module allows you
to embed the platform's native HTML/CSS/Javascript rendering engine in
a wx application like we've always been able to do with wx.webkit on
Mac or with the various ActiveX modules that we've had for windows,
except in the new version it uses the exact same API on all platforms
and also provides an implementation for GTK.  Currently on Windows the
IE Trident engine is used, and WebKit is used on OSX and GTK.  The
code is organized to eventually allow alternate backend renderer
implementations.  The GTK version requires at least version 1.3.1 of
libwebkitgtk-dev, which is the default on most of the recent Linux
distributions.  Please note that although these new classes and
libraries are using names based on "WebView" I have put the wxPython
verison of them in the wx.html2 module because the wxWebKit project
already produces a wx.webview module for wxPython.

The wx.lib.pubsub package has been updated to the latest verison and
several examples have been added to the samples folder.

-- 
Robin Dunn
Software Craftsman
http://wxPython.org