Tracktable 1.7.2

[atwilso]

This release incorporates several bugfixes, a bunch of cleanup to set the stage for 1.8, and one long-requested new feature. We expect to release 1.8.0 in mid-August 2025.

New Features

• Folium proxy. We use the Folium package for rendering
  interactive maps in Jupyter notebooks and Web applications. Folium generates
  HTML that requires Javascript resources out on the open Internet. This is
  awkward on air-gapped installations and other networks that can't access the
  Internet. There are alternatives such as offlinefolium (soon to be published)
  that embed these Javascript resources locally.

  By default, the Folium rendering back end will try to use offlinefolium first,
  then fall back to folium if that's not available. You can configure this
  behavior (including changing the package name and enabling/disabling it) with
  the functions in tracktable.render.backends.folium_proxy.

• Looping animation: Passing anim_loop=True to render_trajectories() will
  cause trajectory animations to loop indefinitely instead of play once and then
  stop.

Bugs Fixed

• Regression in Folium heat maps: Passing a color map to render_heatmap() when
  rendering with Folium would lead to an error caused by trying to call split()
  on values of type np.float64. We've worked around this issue for now. It
  will be fixed properly in an upcoming release of Folium.

• Points were not appearing on heat maps rendered with Cartopy. The cause was
  a missing coordinate transform.

• A call to a deprecated IPython function (to force Matplotlib figures to render
  inline) was causing an exception in notebooks that rendered static images.

• Python documentation now builds after the extension modules have been
  compiled. Previously, trying to build documentation on a just-checked-out
  source tree would often error out because these modules were not in place yet.

Other Changes

• Cleanup: Several configure- and build-time warnings about CMake Boost macros
  have been resolved.

• Cleanup: We now declare C++ tests with a macro instead of multiple lines
  of boilerplate.

• Cleanup: Several warnings about deprecated C++ iterator usage squashed.

• Cleanup: We have removed extra copies of the demo notebooks that had
  uninformative names.

• We now require a C++20 or newer compiler to build Tracktable.

• We now use the libboost-* packages from conda-forge instead of boost-*.
  The names changed after Boost 1.82 or so.

• License specification for Python wheels has changed to use SPDF expressions.
  We have changed our wheel-building configuration to use this. Note:
  Tracktable's license has not changed at all -- just the way we encode
  that license in the metadata for the wheel file.

Coming Soon

Here are some things we've got in the works. We hope (but can't promise) to rel
ease at least some of these by the end of Summer 2025.

• GeoJSON reader/writer for trajectories.

• New data structure for trajectories that will use about 3x less memory.

• New trajectory assembler that can operate in streaming mode and fix minor issu
  es with out-of-order points.

• Point reader adapter to read points from a Pandas DataFrame.

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This discussion was created from the release Tracktable 1.7.2.