Finally a new entry! I've been extremely busy with other things, that is why I did not have time to write more. One of the main reason is related to an important landmark in my professional career, but I'll write more about it after January 1st (hint: those who follow my Twitter updates may have already understood).

As a nice way to break the hiatus, I'm releasing a new version of DataMatrix, my implementation of R's data.frame in Python. Although the version bump is small, there are loads of improvements. First of all, there is proper support for file-like objects, as well as support for appending and inserting both rows and columns. writeMatrix has been substantially improved and now writes files correctly, and I have added (experimental) support for a DataMatrix object that does not require files - EmptyMatrix. Also, there is now [proper documentation]({{ site.url }}/doc/datamatrix/). Last but not least, unit tests have been added, a good way to watch out for regressions in the code.

Finally, this version marks the entrance of dalloliogm as contributor to the code. He gave quite a number of helpful hints, especially with regards to unit tests.

I'm quite satisfied on how DataMatrix behaves - as a matter of fact I use it extensively on a number of internal projects.

You can grab DataMatrix 0.7 as a [source package]({{ site.url }}/files/datamatrix-0.7.tar.gz) or as [a Windows installer]({{ site.url }}/files/datamatrix-0.7.win32.exe). Comments are welcome.