GRASS GIS 7.0 beta released!
Written for GRASS GIS Project by Rashad Kanavath on 2014-05-30
GRASS GIS 7 is the current development version of GRASS GIS. In total, more than 10,000 changes have been implemented so far with respect to GRASS GIS 6.4. The development was started in April 2008 (r31142). Since then a lot of new features have been added to GRASS 7; until the official release becomes available, it is already possible to use GRASS GIS 7 through nightly snapshots.
The graphical user interface based on wxPython (introduced in GRASS GIS 6.4) has been enriched with many new features in order to make complex GIS operations available as simple as possible. The old Tcl/Tk based GUI has been dropped. Relevant new features are available in the core system, among the most important the new Python interface to the C library. This new feature permits Python developers to create new modules in a simple way while at the same time creating powerful and fast modules. Furthermore, the vector library was particularly improved to make it faster and more efficient with support of huge files. This required a easy to manage topology format update including a new spatial index. Finally, there are a series of new modules to analyse raster and vector data; some of the already existing modules were improved and made faster (some even 1000 x faster).
