Python - Our key to Efficiency

eGenix.com mx Extensions for Python - Versions 2.0.x (old)

BASE package
    ( mxDateTime : mxTextTools : mxStack : mxTools : mxProxy : History : Download )

COMMERCIAL package
    ( mxODBC : History : Buy Licenses : Download )

EXPERIMENTAL package
    ( mxNumber : mxTidy : mxURL : mxUID : History : Download )

Commercial Support : Home 		   

Please note: We've announced version 3.0 of the eGenix.com mx Extension Series on 2007-05-10. For more information, please go to the new home page for the extensions or select the relevant package from the above menu (under "Products"). You can find the announcements for these new versions in our news section. Thank you.

Introduction

    The eGenix.com mx Extensions for Python are a collection of professional quality Python software tools which enhance Python's usability in many important areas such as ODBC database connectivity, fast text processing, date/time processing and web site programming.

    The tools have a proven record of being portable across many Unix and Windows platforms, e.g. you can write applications which use an ODBC database on Windows which then run on Unix platforms without change due to the consistent platform independent interfaces.

    All of the available packages have shown their stability and usefulness in many mission critical applications and various commercial settings all around the world.

    The two most well-known packages from the mx Extension Series are mxDateTime and mxODBC providing date/time services and professional ODBC database connectivity on practically all supported Python platforms. These two packages enable database software which is portable not only across platforms, but also across database backends.

Overview

Packages

    The following subpackages are included in the eGenix.com mx Extension series, each providing fast and efficient implementations for various application domains. All subpackages live in the mx top-level Python package to avoid naming collisions with other Python software.

    eGenix.com mx BASE Package:

      mxDateTime - Generic Date/Time Datatypes
      mxTextTools - Fast Text Processing Tools
      mxStack - Fast and Memory-Efficient Stack Datatype
      mxTools - Collection of Additional Builtins
      mxProxy - Generic Object Proxy & Weak Reference Datatype
      mxBeeBase - On-disk B+Tree Database Construction Kit

      >>> Download

    eGenix.com mx COMMERCIAL Package:

      mxODBC - Python DB-API compatible ODBC 2.0 - 3.5 database interface;
      supports Python 1.5.2 and Unicode for Python 2.0 and later

      >>> Download and Buy Licenses

    eGenix.com mx EXPERIMENTAL Package:

      mxURL - Efficient Storage and Management of URL/URI Information
      mxUID - Create and Manage Unique IDs
      mxNumber - Interface to GNU MP's High Precision Numerics
      mxTidy - Interface to a library version of HTML Tidy

      >>> Download


eGenix.com mx Extensions - BASE Package

  Version 2.0.6  

    The eGenix.com mx BASE package contains the Open Source parts of the eGenix.com mx Extension series. They are shipped under the new eGenix.com Public License Agreement Version 1.0.0. This license is an enhanced version of the Python 2.0 license and allows you to use and redistribute the eGenix.com mx BASE package in commercial and non-commercial applications without having to pay a fee or royalties.

    The following subpackages are included in the BASE package:

    mxDateTime - Generic Date/Time Types

      mxDateTime is an extension package that provides three new object types, DateTime, DateTimeDelta and RelativeDateTime, which let you store and handle date/time values in a much more natural way than by using ticks (seconds since 1.1.70 0:00 UTC; the encoding used by the time module).

      You can add, subtract and even multiply instances, pickle and copy them and convert the results to strings, COM dates, ticks and some other more esoteric values. In addition, there are several convenient constructors and formatters at hand to greatly simplify dealing with dates and times in real-world applications.

      In addition to providing an easy-to-use Python interface the package also exports a comfortable C API interface for other extensions to build upon. This is especially interesting for database applications which often have to deal with date/time values (the mxODBC package is one example of an extension using this interface).

    mxTextTools - Fast Text Processing Tools

      mxTextTools is an extension package for Python that provides several useful functions and types that implement high-performance text manipulation and searching algorithms in addition to a very flexible and extendable state machine, the Tagging Engine, that allows scanning and processing text based on low-level byte-code "programs" written using Python tuples. It gives you access to the speed of C without the need to do any compile and link steps every time you change the parsing description.

      Applications include parsing structured text, finding and extracting text (either exact or using translation tables) and recombining strings to form new text.

    mxStack - Fast and Memory-Efficient Stack Type

      mxStack is an extension package that provides a new object type called Stack. It works much like what you would expect from such a type, having .push() and .pop() methods and focusses on obtaining maximum speed at low memory costs.

    mxTools - Collection of Additional Builtins

      mxTools is an extension package that includes a collection of handy functions and objects giving additional functionality in form of new builtins to the Python programmer.

      The package auto-installs the new functions and objects as builtins upon first import. This means that they become instantely available to all other modules without any further action on your part. Add the line import mx.Tools.NewBuiltins to your site.py script and they will be available to all users at your site as if they were installed in the Python interpreter itself.

    mxProxy - Generic Proxy Wrapper Type

      mxProxy is an extension package that provides a new type that is suitable to implement Bastion like features without the need to use restricted execution environments.

      The type's main features are secure data encapsulation (the hidden objects are not accessible from Python since they are stored in internal C structures), customizable attribute lookup methods and a cleanup protocol that helps in breaking circular references prior to object deletion.

      The latest version adds a very interesting new feature: weak references which help you work with circular references in a way that doesn't cause memory leakage in a Python system.

    mxBeeBase - On-disk B+Tree Based Database Kit

      mxBeeBase is a high performance construction kit for disk based indexed databases. It offers components which you can plug together to easily build your own custom mid-sized databases (the current size limit is sizeof(long) which gives you an address range of around 2GB on 32-bit platforms).

      The two basic building blocks in mxBeeBase are storage and index. Storage is implemented as variable record length data storage with integrated data protection features, automatic data recovery and locking for multi process access. Indexes use a high performance optimized B+Tree implementation built on top of Thomas Niemann's Cookbook B+Tree implementation.

    Downloads

    Installation

      On Unix systems supporting the RPM formats the package can be installed using the standard operating system tools, e.g. rpm -i egenix-mx-base-xxxx.rpm will install the package and rpm -e egenix-mx-base-xxxx deinstall it. When installing packages for multiple Python versions, be sure to first install the RPM for the oldest Python version and then proceed with the more recent ones (or use the --force option to install them in any order). Note that the above RPMs install the extensions into /usr/ not /usr/local/ !

      On Windows platforms the preferred method for installation is using the the Windows installer, since this doesn't require a C compiler to be installed on the system. Thanks to Thomas Heller the installer also support uninstall using the standard Windows uninstall procedure.

      All other platforms can use the distutils based installation which allows building and installing the package using the installed Python interpreter and the standard system C compiler. On such a system, unzip the package archive to a temporary directory and then run python setup.py install to install the package and python setup.py uninstall to uninstall it again. Documentation about the usage of distutils (which is part of Python since version 2.0) is available online at the distutils documentation site.

    History

      Note that this change log only lists changes to the package in general, not all the changes to the included subpackages. Please refer to the subpackage documentation for more detailed information.

      Changes from 2.0.5 to 2.0.6:

      • Added Python 2.4 support.

      • Added UCS2 and UCS4 builds of the Linux RPMs. Use UCS4 when installing on more recent Linux distributions.

      Changes from 2.0.4 to 2.0.5:

      • Added Python 2.3 support.

      Changes from 2.0.3 to 2.0.4:

      • RPMs now install to /usr/ instead of /usr/local/. This change was necessary to resynch to the standard Python RPMs.

      • The mx distutils build system was updated to the latest version.

      Changes from 2.0.2 to 2.0.3:

      • Some cleanup of assignments to __debug__ which cause warnings in Python 2.1.

      • Added some missing header files. These are needed by third party tools in case they rely on the provided C interfaces.

      • Changed the error class object fullnames to properly include the complete package path.

      • Corrected a bug in the free list management of the various types which showed up when using pymalloc.

      • Prepared the tools for Python 2.2.

      Changes from 2.0.1 to 2.0.2:

      • Added compiler support for Cygwin. Thanks to Mark Hadfield for pointing out the necessary changes.

      • Reworked the RPM packaging for different Python versions: you can now install the RPMs for different Python versions side-by-side.

      • Updated a few packages, e.g. the mxDateTime package.

      Changes from 2.0.0 to 2.0.1:

      • Added back .h header files to the mx-subdirectories. Third-party software was relying on these files, but the distutils process did not include them per default.

      • New release for Python 2.1.

eGenix.com mx Extensions - COMMERCIAL Package

  Version 2.0.7  

    The eGenix.com mx COMMERCIAL package contains the commercial parts of the eGenix.com mx Extension series. They are shipped under the new eGenix.com Commercial License Agreement Version 1.0.0. This license allows use of the software in non-commercial environment without fee or royalty, but requires buying licenses for commercial use or redistribution. Please contact licenses@egenix.com for details about redistribution terms.

    Note that evaluation of the eGenix.com mx COMMERCIAL package in commercial environments is possible during the first 30 days after initial installation, so that you can test the software thoroughly before making the decision to buy the license or to stop using the software.

    The package comes with full source code, providing you with the benefit of being able to dive into the details of the implementation or to extend/adapt the functionality to your needs.

    The following subpackage is included in the COMMERCIAL package:

    mxODBC - Generic ODBC Interface for Python

      mxODBC is an extension package that provides a Python Database API compliant interface to ODBC capable database drivers and managers (supported ODBC versions are 2.0 - 3.5).

      In addition to the capabilities provided through the standard DB API it also gives access to a rich set of catalog methods which allow you to scan the database for tables, procedures, etc. Furthermore, it uses the mxDateTime package for date/time value interfacing eliminating most of the problems these types normally introduce (other in/output formats are available too).

      The new version does not only allow you to interface to more than one database from one process, it also comes with support for Unicode (which was added to Python in version 2.0).

      The source package includes a varity of preconfigured setups for many commonly used databases such as MySQL, Oracle, Informix, Solid and many more. Precompiled versions of the extension for use with the Windows ODBC manager and the Unix iODBC manager are also available.

    Downloads

      IMPORTANT:

      By downloading, installing or using egenix-mx-commercial package, you agree to the terms and conditions set forth in the eGenix.com Commercial License Agreement Version 1.0.0.

      Prerequisites:
      The COMMERCIAL package is based on the eGenix.com mx BASE package which has to be installed prior to installing the COMMERCIAL add-on package.

      Commercial Support:
      Professional level support for this package as well as all other mx packages is available directly from the developers at eGenix.com.

      Consulting:
      eGenix.com offers professional consulting services around this package, including customized modifications, help with application design around this package and on-site problem solving. Please contact mailto:consulting@egenix.com for details.

      Free User Support:
      We have created a user mailing list where users can help users. To sign up, please use the egenix-users mailing list web-interface. You can unsubscribe using the same interface at any time.

      Downloads are no longer available.

      Please upgrade to our new eGenix.com mxODBC Distribution. It is backwards compatible and provides better support for today's ODBC managers and drivers, Python 2.5, as well as a whole set of new features.

      If you still need the old mxODBC 2.0.x versions, please contact sales@egenix.com for download information.

    Installation

      On Unix systems supporting the RPM formats the package can be installed using the standard operating system tools, e.g. rpm -i egenix-mx-commercial-xxxx.rpm will install the package and rpm -e egenix-mx-commercial-xxxx deinstall it. If you don't have both iODBC and unixODBC installed on your system, you should try to run rpm -i --nodeps egenix-mx-commercial-xxxx.rpm. This will skip the dependency checks and forces an install even though RPM cannot find all required libs.

      On Windows platforms the preferred method for installation is using the the Windows installer, since this doesn't require a C compiler to be installed on the system. Thanks to Thomas Heller the installer also support uninstall using the standard Windows uninstall procedure.

      All other platforms can use the distutils based installation which allows building and installing the package using the installed Python interpreter and the standard system C compiler. On such a system, unzip the package archive to a temporary directory and then run python setup.py install to install the package and python setup.py uninstall to uninstall it again. Documentation about the usage of distutils (which is part of Python since version 2.0) is available online at the distutils documentation site.

    Buying Commercial Use Licenses

      Note: Using mxODBC in commercial environment is not free of charge. If you intend to use mxODBC in your company, you will have to get a proper license from eGenix.com after the initial 30-day evaluation period (which starts at the time of download).

      License Offerings

      End-User

      Licenses for commercial end-users are available as CPU licenses which allow installing and using mxODBC on one machine.

      Prices start at USD 95.00 / EUR 75.00 for a 1-CPU license, for volume discounts, please see the eGenix.com Online Shop. We also offer site and corporate licenses; please write to sales@egenix.com for quotes on these.

      Developers

      For developers we have added a Developer CPU license which allows redistribution of mxODBC as part of products built using the developer license. The Developer CPU license costs USD 1,650.00 / EUR 1,250.00 per developer CPU.

      If you want to redistribute mxODBC as part of a product on a per-CPU basis (rather than on a per-developer basis), we have a special license agreement for this as well. Please send your request to licenses@egenix.com.

      Ordering

      mxODBC and all other mx packages are maintained by eGenix.com Software GmbH, Langenfeld in Germany. To buy licenses, please visit our secure eGenix.com Online Shop which is powered by our partner ShareIT.com (a service of the Element 5 AG, Cologne, Germany). Payment options include credit card, bank/wire transfer, check and cash, billed in many different currencies including US dollars and Euro.

      When ordering a license, you will receive a license key by email which identifies your license and works as temporary Proof of Authorization for the version you ordered as mentioned in the eGenix.com Commercial License. After having received the order, eGenix.com will then send you a signed Proof of Authorization within four weeks.

      For more details on payment options and licensed usage, please check the eGenix.com Online Shop and the eGenix.com Licenses.

      Support

      Support for the Python mx Extensions is available as well. See the Support Section of this page for details.

      Please send support questions regarding the new licenses to licenses@egenix.com.

      If you want to know more about the provided services, please contact the eGenix.com Information Desk.

    History

      Note that this change log only lists changes to the package in general, not all the changes to the included subpackages. Please refer to the subpackage documentation for more detailed information.

      Changes from 2.0.6 to 2.0.7:

      • Added Python 2.4 support.

      • Added UCS2 and UCS4 builds of the Linux RPMs. Use UCS4 when installing on more recent Linux distributions.

      Changes from 2.0.5 to 2.0.6:

      • Added Python 2.3 support.

      Changes from 2.0.4 to 2.0.5:

      • Added full Unicode support for longchar and ntext columns for MS SQL Server and MS Access ODBC drivers.

      Changes from 2.0.3 to 2.0.4:

      • Enhanced compatiblity to Unicode-aware ODBC drivers such as the latest MS SQL Server and MS Access ODBC drivers.

      • Minor fixes to workaround problems with buggy ODBC drivers.

      Changes from 2.0.2 to 2.0.3:

      • Added compiler support for Cygwin. Thanks to Mark Hadfield for pointing out the necessary changes.

      • Reworked the RPM packaging for different Python versions: you can now install the RPMs for different Python versions side-by-side.

      Changes from 2.0.1 to 2.0.2:

      • New release for Python 2.1.

      Changes from 2.0.0 to 2.0.1:

      • Added work-arounds to aid in connecting to databases using the Windows ODBC manager.

eGenix.com mx Extensions - EXPERIMENTAL Package

  Version 0.9.0  

    The eGenix.com mx EXPERIMENTAL package contains experimental software which will eventually be integrated into one of the standard eGenix.com mx Extension series packages.

    The package may contain subpackages which are shipped under the eGenix.com Public License Agreement Version 1.0.0, the eGenix.com Commercial License Agreement Version 1.0.0 and other licenses such as the Library GNU Public License (LGPL) or MIT licenses.

    Please note that the software in these packages is still in alpha or beta state and does not meet the quality standards of production quality software.

    The following subpackages are included in the EXPERIMENTAL package:

    mxNumber - Extended Numeric Types

      mxNumber is an extension package which provides access to a new set of basic numeric types.

      The package uses the GNU Multi-Precision Library (GMP) as basis for providing this functionality at high performance on a wide range of platforms including all Unix and Windows platforms. This library is licensed under the Library GNU Public License (LGPL) which means that it does not have the viral character as the standard GPL does. It usable with software which is not GPL-compatible, such as closed-source commercial software.

      This mxNumber package is licensed under the eGenix.com Public License Agreement Version 1.0.0; the Windows package also includes a pre-compiled version of the GNU Multi-Precision Library (GMP) which eGenix.com ported to Windows. The patches needed for porting GMP to Windows are also included in the source package.

      Note: mxNumber relies on the new coercions features in Python 2.1. Older Python versions are not supported and mxNumber won't run with these versions.

    mxTidy - Interface to HTML Tidy (HTML/XML cleanup tool)

      mxTidy provides a Python interface to a thread-safe, library version of the HTML Tidy. command line tool.

      HTML Tidy helps you to cleanup coding errors in HTML and XML files and produce well-formed HTML, XHTML or XML as output. This allows you to preprocess web-page for inclusion in XML repositories, prepare broken XML files for validation and also makes it possible to write converters from well-known word processing applications such as MS Word to other structured data representations by using XML as intermediate format.

    mxURL - An URL Datatype

      mxURL provides a new datatype for storing and manipulating URL values as well as a few helpers related to URL building, encoding and decoding.

      The main intention of the package is to provide an easy to use, fast and lightwheight datatype for Universal Resource Locators (note the W3C now calls these URIs).

    mxUID - An UID Datatype

      mxUID provides a fast mechanism for generating universal identification strings (UIDs). The intent is to make these UIDs unique with high probability in order to serve as object or data set identifiers.

      A typical use lies in generating session IDs. Other areas where unique IDs play an important role are RPC-implementations, ORBs, etc.

    Downloads

    Installation

      On Unix systems supporting the RPM formats the package can be installed using the standard operating system tools, e.g. rpm -i egenix-mx-experimental-xxxx.rpm will install the package and rpm -e egenix-mx-experimental-xxxx deinstall it. When installing packages for multiple Python versions, be sure to first install the RPM for the oldest Python version and then proceed with the more recent ones (or use the --force option to install them in any order).

      The UCS2 Unicode builds of the RPMs are needed for older SuSE and RedHat systems. More recent Linux distributions have switched to UCS4 Unicode for their Python distribution. You cannot mix UCS2 and UCS4 builds of Python and binary extensions. If you get unresolved symbols when loading binary extensions that mention UCS2 or UCS4, it is likely that you installed the wrong version of the RPM for your system.

      On Windows platforms the preferred method for installation is using the the Windows installer, since this doesn't require a C compiler to be installed on the system. Thanks to Thomas Heller the installer also support uninstall using the standard Windows uninstall procedure.

      All other platforms can use the distutils based installation which allows building and installing the package using the installed Python interpreter and the standard system C compiler. On such a system, unzip the package archive to a temporary directory and then run python setup.py install to install the package and python setup.py uninstall to uninstall it again. Documentation about the usage of distutils (which is part of Python since version 2.0) is available online at the distutils documentation site.

    History

      Note that this change log only lists changes to the package in general, not all the changes to the included subpackages. Please refer to the subpackage documentation for more detailed information.

      Changes from 0.8.0 to 0.9.0:

      • Added Python 2.4 support.

      • Added UCS2 and UCS4 builds of the Linux RPMs. Use UCS4 when installing on more recent Linux distributions.

      Changes from 0.7.0 to 0.8.0:

      • Added Python 2.3 support.

      Changes from 0.6.0 to 0.7.0:

      • Changed the error class object fullnames to properly include the complete package path.

      • Fixed a bug in the distutils setup which caused the linking of mxNumber against GMP to be skipped on Unix platforms. Thanks to Keith Briggs for pointing me to this bug.

      • Moved the RPM installation paths from /usr/local to /usr to be compliant to the standard Python RPMs which are made available on python.org.

      • Fixed a UTF-8 related bug in mxTidy.

      Changes from 0.5.0 to 0.6.0:

      • Added new packages mxURL and mxUID.

      • The package now depends on the BASE package (at least the new subpackages mx.URL and mx.UID do).

      Changes from 0.4.0 to 0.5.0:

      • Added some missing header files. These are needed by third party tools in case they rely on the provided C interfaces.

      • Bugfixes in mxTidy, version 0.2.0.

      Changes from 0.3.0 to 0.4.0:

      • Added new experimental package mxTidy.

      • Reworked the docs a little and corrected the misnaming of mxNumber (it was called mxNumeric in a few places).

      • Minor tweaks to the mxNumber package.

      • Added some missing header files. These are needed by third party tools in case they rely on the provided C interfaces.

      Changes from 0.2.0 to 0.3.0:

      • Updated mxNumber to version 0.3.0.

      • Reworked the RPM packaging for different Python versions: you can now install the RPMs for different Python versions side-by-side.

Commercial Support

    Commercial email support for all mx packages is available from eGenix.com GmbH, Langenfeld, Germany.

    Due to popular demand, we have setup a per-incident support service which is based on support tickets. A ticket for USD 185.00 / EUR 150.00 is valid for one support incident and includes up to one hour of consulting work. Tickets can be bought online from the secure eGenix.com Online Shop which is powered by ShareIT.com.

    Support for the Python mx Extensions is available as email support only. Support languages are English or German.

    Please send support questions to support@egenix.com together with the order reference ID (the ticket ID) you receive by email when buying tickets in the subject line, e.g. "mxODBC and Sybase (Ref# 667514)".

    If you want to know more about the provided services, please contact the eGenix.com Information Desk.

© 1997-2000, Copyright by Marc-André Lemburg; All Rights Reserved. mailto: mal@lemburg.com
© 2000-2004, Copyright by eGenix.com Software GmbH, Langenfeld; All Rights Reserved. mailto: info@egenix.com
Trademarks: "mx Extensions" is a trademark of Marc-Andre Lemburg and eGenix.com GmbH.