Today we have for you not just one, but two exciting EPD releases — an update of EPD to 7.3 and a beta release previewing new features coming in EPD 8.0.
The EPD 7.3 update adds several new packages including Shapely, openpyxl, and a new package from Enthought named Enaml. Enaml is a new package for rapidly building UIs using a very “Pythonic” declarative language heavily inspired by Qt’s QML langage.
EPD 7.3 also includes a host of package updates, including adding OpeNDAP support to the NetCDF4 package. Overall over 30 packages have been updated, including Cython, IPython, pandas, basemap, scikit-learn, Twisted and SQLAlchemy.
EPD 8.0 beta takes all that we know and love in EPD 7.x and adds an all-new graphical development and analysis environment. The new GUI is focused on providing a fast, lightweight interface designed for scientists and engineers. Some of the key features are:
- A Python-centric text editor including tab-completion plus on-the-fly code analysis.
- An interactive Python (IPython) prompt integrated with the code editor to enable rapid prototyping and exploration.
- A Python package manager to make is easier to discover, install, and update packages in the Enthought Python Distribution.
- Integrated documentation, both on the GUI itself and standard online documentation.
Which version should you install? EPD 7.3 is the current production release and has the most testing behind it. If you want to try out EPD 8.0 beta we would love to hear what you think. EPD 8 is designed to work with earlier versions so once you install the GUI you can either setup a new EPD environment or tell it to use your existing one. And don’t worry, it’s safe — it won’t modify your existing EPD.
As always, if you have an existing EPD 7.x install that you want to keep you can update all of the Python packages to EPD 7.3 by running the command “enpkg epd” from the command line. Or, if you have installed the EPD 8 GUI, just open the package manager, select the ‘EPD’ package and click ‘Install’. It will update you EPD 7.x environment for you.
EPD 8 can be downloaded from https://beta.enthought.com/EPD_8/download/.
Any comments, questions, complaints, or compliments on the beta release can be sent to beta-feedback@enthought.com.