[NeXus-committee] Beta-release of NeXpy

[Osborn, Raymond]

I thought I should give the committee early notification that NeXpy v0.1.1 is now available on PyPI. This is a radically revised version from the one I demonstrated a few years ago, e.g., using PyQt rather than wxPython. However, probably the most important change is that it utilizes h5py rather than the Python version of NAPI, because our focus is now on very large data sets, and I had to depend on the memory mapped file features that h5py provides. 

Obviously, this means that it won't currently read HDF4 or XML NeXus files, which I regret. Once the bugs in this version have been ironed out, I will consider reintroducing at least HDF4 and XML imports, but in a way that won't prevent the application from running if the NeXus API has not been installed.

The big advantage of using h5py is that installing NeXpy should be as easy as typing 'easy_install nexpy' or 'pip install nexpy', which might encourage some people to try it out.

There is fairly extensive documentation at http://nexpy.github.io/nexpy/. If you have a chance to try it out, I would welcome any feedback about the functionality and design, and please post any issues you find on the Github at https://github.com/nexpy/nexpy/issues. I will issue patch releases fairly frequently. I would also be delighted if anyone wanted to be involved in its development. I'd be happy to make you a contributor on the Github.

I will announce this to the NeXus Mailing List in the next month or so.

Thanks,
Ray
-- 
Ray Osborn, Senior Scientist
Materials Science Division
Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne, IL 60439, USA
Phone: +1 (630) 252-9011
Email: ROsborn at anl.gov