This release includes many additional IO and Query
classes. Among other things, support has been
added for FITS binary tables, STL, GaiaPick,
UKIRTBS, FINDOFF, Astrom, and SExtractor IO
formats. This release will be the last of the V3.x
releases and is a check point release on the way
to V4 which, while it contains major feature
enhancements, will probably break backwards
compatibility with preceding versions of the
module.
Version 3 of the module breaks the existing API used by preceding versions. However, much new functionality is introduced that would have been hard to implement and maintain backwards compatibility. New features for V3 include pluggable I/O support, filtering, and inline sorting of retrieved catalogues. Many of the improvements are not readily noticeable by the user, as alot of work has gone into the infrastructure of the package. This means that adding additional I/O and Query support has been made much easier.
