[Pytables-announce] ANN: ViTables 1.0 beta available

[Vicent M. (V+) <vm...@ca...>]

Announcing ViTables-1.0b
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I'm happy to announce the availability of ViTables-1.0b, the new member
of the PyTables family. It's a graphical tool for browsing and editing
files in both PyTables and HDF5 format.

As it happens with the entire PyTables family, the main strength of
ViTables is its ability to manage really large datasets in a fast and
comfortable manner. For example, with ViTables you can open a table with
one thousand millions of rows in a few tenths of second, with very low
memory requirements.

In this release you will find, among others, the following features:

 - Display data hierarchy as a fully browsable object tree.
 - Open several files simultaneously.
 - Reorganize your existing files in a graphical way.
 - Display files and nodes (group or leaf) properties, including
   metadata and attributes.
 - Display heterogeneous entities, i.e. tables.
 - Display homogeneous (numeric or textual) entities, i.e. arrays.
 - Zoom into multidimensional table cells.
 - Editing capabilities for nodes and attributes: creation/deletion,
   copy/paste, rename...
 - Fully integrated documentation browser

Moreover, once CSTables (the client-server version of PyTables) will
be out, ViTables will be able to manage remote PyTables/HDF5 files as
if they were local ones.

Platforms
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At the moment, ViTables has been fully tested only on Linux platforms,
but as it is made on top of Python, Qt, PyQt and PyTables, its
portability should be really good and should work just fine in other
Unices (like MacOSX) and Windows.

Note for Windows users:
Due to license issues, commercial versions of Qt and PyQt are needed to
run ViTables on Windows platforms. Furthermore, those libraries must be
packaged in a special manner to fulfill some special license
requirements. An installer that handles properly these issues is being
developed. A Windows version of ViTables will be published as soon as
the installer development finishes.

Current development state
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This is a beta version. The first stable, commercial, version will be
available late on Mars.

What is in the package
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In the package you will find the program sources, some info files as
README, INSTALL and LICENSE, and the documentation
directory. Documentation includes the User's Guide in HTML4 and also the
xml source file, so you can format it as you want. Finally, those of you
interested in the internals of ViTables can find the documentation of
all its modules in HTML4 format.

Legal notice
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Please, remember that this is commercial software. The beta version is
made publically available so that beta testers can work on it, but the
terms of the license must be respected. Basically it means that the
software or its modifications cannot be distributed to anybody in any
way without C=C3=A1rabos explicit permission. See the LICENSE file for
detailed information.

Share your experience
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Let me know of any bugs, suggestions, gripes, kudos, etc. you may have.

Enjoy Data with ViTables, the troll of the PyTables family!

Vicent Mas

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