ANNOUNCE: kiwi 1.9.3

[Johan Dahlin <jdahlin async com br>]

Kiwi is a PyGTK framework for building graphical applications loosely
based on MVC Model-View-Controller (MVC) and Allen Holub's Visual proxy
[1]. Think of Kiwi as a high-level, object-oriented layer built on
PyGTK.

Its design is based on real-world experience using PyGTK to develop
large desktop applications, which use many concepts common to most
graphical applications: multiple windows and dialogs, forms, data
persistence, lists and high-level classes that support domain objects
directly.


Download
========

Grab the latest sources from:

  http://www.async.com.br/projects/kiwi/download/kiwi-1.9.3.tar.gz

Win32 installer and rpms can be found here:

  http://www.async.com.br/projects/kiwi/download/binaries


What's new since 1.9.2?
=======================

* UI Test framework
  Features a recorder and a player. The recorder allows you to record
  different tasks, a script will be saved which will reproduce the
  actions you made in the interface.

* Add a hyperlink widget
  Flexible and simple widget modeled after a link in a web browser
  Support menus and GMarkup decorating. Contributed by Ali Afshar

* Add a selectable box
  A selectable box is a box subclass which draws a selection
  around a child.

* Currency data type
  It's now a real data type which can be used by the framework
  and the list.

* Simple dialogs
  Easy, good looking and simple dialogs for displaying information,
  warnings, errors.

* Logging helpers
  Very simple logging framework, somewhat based on the one in flumotion
  and GStreamer.

* Minor changes
  Validation improvements
  Documentation improvements
  Win32 installation (Carlos Augusto Marcicano)
  argcheck extensions (Henrique Romano)


Features
========

* An MVC-derived framework of classes:
  * Views, which represent the graphical display
  * Controllers, which handles user interaction with the widgets
    in a View.
  * Delegates, combines a View and a Controller.
  * Models, which are special mixins for your domain objects
  * Proxies, special types of Delegate designed to implement forms

* Validation: Kiwi supports validation on different levels:
  data type validation and verification on the Model/Proxy level,
  View validation and hooks for visually displaying validation state.

* A List widget, which provides a higher level abstraction of
  GtkTreeView and all its classes (GtkTreeModel, GtkTreeViewColumn,
  GtkCellRenderer) with hooks to easily integrate into the
  Kiwi Framework.

* Gazpacho integration for most (non-deprecated) interactive
  widgets with attributes for handling validation and proxy
  attributes.

* Kiwi Tasklets
  Tasklet is a small coroutines framework written by Gustavo Carneiro,
  it was previously known as gtasklets.

* PyGTK utilities, to make it easier to add signals and properties to
  your objects.

* i18n translation utilities, to help you translate PyGTK applications,
  currently depends on gettext and intltool.

* and many other things!


Requirements
============

Python 2.3 or higher (2.4 recommended)  http://www.python.org/
PyGTK 2.6.0 or higher (2.8 recommended) http://www.pygtk.org/
gazpacho 0.6.2 (svn recommenced)        http://gazpacho.sicem.biz/


Documentation
=============
New in this released is API documentation which is generated using
epydoc[3]. It's still being written but at this point I feel that
it's good enough to be a very useful resource to help understand
kiwi. It can be found at

 http://www.async.com.br/projects/kiwi/api/

Included in the tarball are also a number of examples, which serves as a
good starting point. Keep in mind that most of them require gazpacho to
be installed.


Thanks
======
Christian Robottom Reis: Original author and design
Lorenzo Gil Sanchez: PyGTK 2.x port

Also thanks to the following people which has contributed features
or bug reports:
Ali Afshar, Henrique Romano, Daniel Saran R. da Cunha, Evandro Vale 
Miquelito, Gustavo Barbieri, Gustavo Carneiro, Sidnei da Silva


Resources
=========

Homepage     http://www.async.com.br/projects/kiwi/
Download     http://www.async.com.br/projects/kiwi/download/
Repository   http://svn.async.com.br/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/kiwi/
Report a bug http://bugs.async.com.br/enter_bug.cgi?product=Kiwi
API docs     http://www.async.com.br/projects/kiwi/api/
Open bugs    http://tinyurl.com/cyrms
Mail. list   http://www.async.com.br/mailman/listinfo/kiwi/

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller
[2] http://tinyurl.com/2ccch
[3] http://epydoc.sourceforge.net/

--
Johan Dahlin <jdahlin async com br>
Async Open Source