What's New In Python: 2006 Edition

2006 has been a busy year for Python. As well as bugfix releases for 
Python 2.4, there has been a new major release of Python - Python 2.5.

This talk will cover many of the new shiny features of Python 2.5, as well
as providing a roundup of other major news from the world of Python.

Python 2.5 is the major piece of news for 2006. This is the most significant 
release of Python since Python 2.2. We've seen a host of changes under the 
hood including a new bytecode compiler and much improved 64 bit 
support, as well as a reworking of some of the obmalloc memory management. 
There have been new major language features added including the 'with' 
statement (it's not what you think!). 

2.5 also features the addition of some best-of-breed Python modules 
to the standard library. This includes ctypes, ElementTree, sqlite and 
wsgiref.  New packages like mailbox and hashlib make the "batteries 
included" with Python much more powerful. 

2006 has been a year of more than just changes to the language. 
Python now uses the buildbot system for continuous testing of the 
implementation, a completely new web system was rolled out for 
www.python.org, and there is an increased focus on producing the 
most reliable code possible. 

This talk will also cover the latest from the world of alternative Python 
implementations: IronPython, Jython and PyPy. All three have made significant
advances in the last year. 



Anthony Baxter has been involved in the open source community for over
a decade, largely working in Python and, in the last few years, on
Python. He's worked in the Internet area and now in the telco space,
where he gets to exercise his incredibly short attention span by working
on far, far too many things at once. He's written or contributed to more
open source projects than he can remember--mostly related to networking
and protocol implementations.  
Anthony is also the release manager for Python. This is much less glamorous 
than you might think. His real job is at ekit, a telco focussing on the 
travel market.