Hi all,
on behalf of the IPython development team, I'm thrilled to announce,
after an intense 4 1/2 months of work, the official release of IPython
0.12.
This is a very important release for IPython, for several reasons.
First and foremost, we have a major new feature, our interactive
web-based notebook, that has been in our sights for a very long time.
We tried to build one years ago (with WX) as a Google SoC project in
2005, had other prototypes later on, but things never quite worked.
Finally the refactoring effort started two years ago, the
communications architecture we built in 2010, and the advances of
modern browsers, gave us all the necessary pieces.
With this foundation in place, while part of the team worked on the
0.11 release, Brian Granger had already started quietly building the
web notebook, which we demoed in early-alpha mode at the SciPy 2011
conference (http://www.archive.org/details/Wednesday-203-6-IpythonANewArchitectureForInteractiveAndParallel).
By the EuroScipy conference in August we had merged Brian's amazing
effort into our master branch, and after that multiple people (old and
new) jumped in to make all kinds of improvements, leaving us today
with something that is an excellent foundation. It's still the first
release of the notebook, and as such we know it has a number of rough
edges, but several of us have been using it as a daily research tool
for the last few months. Do not hesitate to file issues for any
problems you encounter with it, and we even have an 'open issue' for
general discussion of ideas and features for the notebook at:
https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/977.
Furthermore, it is clear that our big refactoring work, combined with
the amazing facilities at Github, are paying off. The 0.11 series was
a major amount of work, with 511 issues closed over almost two years.
But that pales in comparison to this cycle: in only 4 1/2 months we
closed 515 issues, with 50% being Pull Requests. And very importantly,
our list of contributors includes many new faces (see the credits
section in our release notes for full details), which is the best
thing that can happen to an open source project.
We hope you will find the new features (the notebook isn't the only
one! see below) compelling, and that many more will not only use
IPython but will join the project; there's plenty to do and now there
are tasks for many different skill sets (web, javascript, gui work,
low-level networking, parallel machinery, console apps, etc).
*Downloads*
Download links and instructions are at: http://ipython.org/download.html
And IPython is also on PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ipython
Those contain a built version of the HTML docs; if you want pure
source downloads with no docs, those are available on github:
Tarball: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/tarball/rel-0.12
Zipball: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/zipball/rel-0.12
* Features *
Here is a quick listing of the major new features:
- An interactive browser-based Notebook with rich media support
- Two-process terminal console
- Tabbed QtConsole
- Full Python 3 compatibility
- Standalone Kernel
- PyPy support
And many more...
We closed over 500 tickets, merged over 200 pull requests, and more
than 45 people contributed commits for the final release.
Please see our release notes for the full details on everything about
this release:
http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/stable/whatsnew/version0.12.html
* IPython tutorial at PyCon 2012 *
Those of you attending (or planning on it) PyCon 2012 in Santa Clara,
CA, may be interested in attending a hands-on tutorial we will be
presenting on the many faces of IPython. See
https://us.pycon.org/2012/schedule/presentation/121/ for full details.
* Errata *
This was caught by Matthias Bussionnier's (one of our great new
contributors) sharp eyes while I was writing these release notes: In
the example notebook called display_protocol, the first cell starts
with:
from IPython.lib.pylabtools import print_figure
which should instead be:
from IPython.core.pylabtools import print_figure
This has already been fixed on master, but since the final 0.12 files
have been uploaded to github and PyPI, we'll let them be.
As usual, if you find any other problem, please file a ticket --or
even better, a pull request fixing it-- on our github issues site
(https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/).
Many thanks to all who contributed!
Fernando, on behalf of the IPython development team.