[vtkusers] ANNOUNCE: vtk 6.1.0.rc1 is available to download

[David E DeMarle]

Kitware and the VTK team are happy to announce that VTK 6.1 has entered the
release candidate stage!

You can find the source, data, and new vtkpython binary packages here:
http://www.vtk.org/VTK/resources/software.html#cand

Please try this version of VTK and report any issues to the list or the bug
tracker so that we can try to address them before VTK 6.1.0 final.

The official release notes will be available when VTK final is released in
the next few weeks. In the meantime here is a preview:

VTK continues to evolve to make use of the parallelism available in modern
architectures. In this release we introduce the vtkDax accelerator module
and vtkSMP multithreaded filters. The Dax interface allows VTK to offload
work to Sandia's Dax framework for GPGPU and multi-core data processing.
Inria's vtkSMP brings a framework for fine-grained work-stealing parallel
processing inside of unstructured data processing filters.

In this release VTK also takes a giant leap onto the web processing
frontier. ParaView's core web interface and widget components have been
promoted to VTK. Several web applications are provided as examples that
show how to use VTK processing and rendering in a Web context. VTK's web
interface also includes newly developed features such as an integrated,
object-oriented python framework for writing dashboard tests of web
applications, a simple python-based launcher and file upload server, and a
new viewport that drives the VGL (webgl-based) rendering library developed
by Kitware and NYU.

Another major advance is the introduction of the vtkMappedDataArray class
and a related set of changes that create a new abstract interface to
external data storage. This allows, for example, zero copy import from and
export to external simulation packages which may layout their data
differently than VTK does.

There are numerous improvements to VTK's low level OpenGL interfaces. These
include better error reporting, allowing depth peeled translucency on AMD
graphics chipssets, and allowing the use of advanced rendering features
available in modern OSMesa releases. Concurrently we've also removed the
dated and little used XML and Cg shaders.

We've made many improvements to VTK's build system in this release. We now
use private dependencies among VTK modules to avoid exporting
implementation symbols and shorten the link line length. To simplify the
creation of applications that depend on subsets of VTK there is a new macro
that simplifies object factory creation for implementation modules and two
new python scripts that inspect and display module dependencies. We've
replaced the old setup.py driven python installation code with a set of
standard CMake installation rules and reworked the installation rules to
allow the generation Java Maven packages for any platform. Starting with
this release we use CMake's ExternalData module to obtain the specific
versions of regression test data files that are needed. This reduces false
negative results in automated testing of proposed patches to VTK. VTK's
minimum required CMake version is now 2.8.8.

Starting with this release Kitware will be publishing, in addition to the
usual source, data and documentation packages, runnable binaries of VTK's
python shell interface for Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems. These
replace and improve upon the old vtk-tcl.exe windows-only package, and like
it are intended to allow users to quickly get started using VTK without the
hassle of building it from source.

Besides these areas, VTK has numerous other focused improvements. Some of
the most notable of these are:
* Fixes to make VTK compatible with FreeBSD, OSX 10.9, c++11 and Qt 5.
* Allow VTK to use the system installed netCDF library.
* C++ methods that take pointers to structs are now accessible in python.
* Several new information visualization capabilities that are summarized in
the kitware blog post at http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/554.
* A new set of JOGL based grapical components which keep VTK compatible
with Java 7 on Mac OSX.
* Improvements to text rendering such as better unicode support, font file
loading and GL2PS label export.
* Added support for rendering double precision numbers in the charts.

We hope you enjoy this release of VTK! As always contact Kitware and the
mailing lists for assistance.

David E DeMarle
Kitware, Inc.
R&D Engineer
21 Corporate Drive
Clifton Park, NY 12065-8662
Phone: 518-881-4909
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