Simon Willison’s Weblog

Python 2.3

30th July 2003

After numerous alphas and betas, Python 2.3 has been released. Python.org has highlights of the release, while A.M. Kuchling’s What’s New in Python 2.3 goes in to a bit more detail. There’s some great new stuff, but the feature that particularly caught my eye is this:

ssl—the Windows installer now incorporates SSL support. (New in 2.3a2: timeouts set on the underlying socket are now handled correctly.)

That’s pretty sweet; with 2.3 we can deploy Windows applications that securely communicate over the internet out-of-the-box. Combined with web services and server-side content management systems that ability could be very useful indeed.

Incidentally, since today is the 29th of June this release means that 2.3 has met the August 1st deadline for inclusion in the next version of Mac OS X. Owning a Mac is looking more and more attractive.