Today’s release of OpenMDAO, v0.6.2, is mostly put out as a bug-fix release. Issues addressed mostly bugs, specifically setting vartree values in the GUI. New features include the introduction of an early version of geometry visualization in the GUI. Drop by our downloads page to check out the new version and to review the release notes.

OpenMDAO 0.6.0 has been released. Download it today! Here are the release notes:

Backwards Incompatible Change:
A new VarTree variable type has been added to the API, which changes the way VariableTree objects are created in components. Slots are NO LONGER used for VariableTree objects. The change removes the need to add initialization code to components for VariableTrees. New declaration syntax is explained in OpenMDAO docs. https://openmdao.org/docs/basics/variables.html#variable-trees

New Features:
No default “top” assembly in GUI projects any more. New projects are now blank, and an assembly must be created manually.
Column choosing and sorting now implemented in properties panels.

Bug Fixes:
Replace method added to component for use with slots in component.
Duplicate client-server communication calls removed when component is clicked.
Variables documentation clarified and improved along with VarTree changes.
Plugin documents work from right-click menu in Library tab.

OpenMDAO proudly announces the release of version 0.5.5.

Here are the release notes:

Features
–  Can connect to sub-variables of a variable tree, or elements of a 1-D Array, from the GUI
–  Updated project page
–  New Lazy Component base class, for components that want to calculate only connected outputs
–  Edit passthrough window redesigned to support variable trees and arrays
–  Model errors are now reported to the console window, instead of a popup
–  Tabs in component editor windows (inputs, outputs, slots, etc.) are listed in a more sensible order now
–  Variables in the inputs and outputs tabs can now be filtered via a text box in the upper right-hand corner
–  Installation on OSX is now much easier; no longer requires Xcode

API Changes
–  Component check_config function is now called down the whole model hierarchy before any component executes

Bug Fixes
–  Invalidation of i/o now works if you set items of a list or dict (Still does not work for numpy arrays though.)
–  View docs command line and GUI menu option work again
–  Editing files in the GUI, on Windows, with Python 2.6 now works

We of the OpenMDAO team are evaluating what platforms and which Python versions to support. Specifically, we are considering phasing out the support for Python2.6 as well as some older versions of Windows and Ubuntu. If you’d like to let us know what you are using, drop by this thread in the forums and make yourself heard!

OpenMDAO has released a new version with some significant changes. Head over to our downloads section to get the new release. Check out the 0.5.0 release notes for the latest changes and bug fixes.

For those of you who are new to the site and project and are wondering how we track development, there’s a new section of the dev docs that deals with this topic.  Perhaps you checked us out on GitHub and thought that based on the GitHub Issues the project wasn’t very active.  Well, we are alive, well, and extremely active, but while we do host our code on GitHub, we track our development using Pivotal Tracker.  Pivotal Tracker seems to be a better tool for keeping up with our agile development process.

If you don’t feel like reading the documentation or if you just want to check and see what we’re working on, feel free to visit and browse our publicly-viewable page on Pivotal.

Important Note:

Unfortunately, GitHub made a backwards incompatible change to their API recently. We’ve been relying on their API for our plugin install tools. The change has been addressed, and plugin installation works again in 0.4.0, but it is broken for all previous versions of OpenMDAO. You can still use plugins in older versions, but you need to go to GitHub and download the tar.gz files yourself and then point to them for the plugin install.

New Features:

– History in command window can be accessed with up/down arrows

– Create passthrough variables for an assembly via a right-click

– Re-write of the MetaModel component to accommodate GUI usage. New Docs added to show usage.

– Model saving now happens automatically in GUI, with optional checkpoint/reverting from file menu

– GUI support for instantiating objects with arguments to the constructor

– Support for displaying variable trees in the inputs/outputs panel of component editor in GUI

– Support for “adding events to driver” in GUI. Users can now finish MetaModel tutorial problem through GUI

– Added A FloatKrigingSurrogate class that works same as KrigingSurrogate, except returns a float instead of a NormalDistribution

– Users can expand and collapse workflows in the Workflows tab

– Can pass either an instance or a class to the slot. If instance is passed, then that is used as the default value.

– Can rename files from the file tree

– CSV case recorders work in GUI now. New option added to cause them to archive older output files on successive runs.

– Documentation is now contained locally for all OpenMDAO releases (instead of relying on the web-versions at openmdao.org)

Bug Fixes:

– Users can no longer create components with names from the math library

– Major Fix to the plugin installer to deal with Github API change

– Errors that are logged to the console windows no longer show up twice

– Can no longer create passthroughs on variables that are blocked by connections or pointed to by parameters in drivers

– Can no longer create connection to variable that is pointed to by a parameter

– Fixed bug in text editor on OSX machines that caused text not to show up until you scrolled around

We’ve released OpenMDAO v 0.3.0, which is the first official version to include our new web-browser-based GUI. We’ve updated our documentation with a new section on how to load up the GUI. We’ve also produced several screencasts to walk you through working with the GUI. The screencasts follow the tutorials in our text-based docs and show you how to perform a simple optimization and set up a basic design of experiments.

This release represents just the initial GUI capability, and the development team will still be actively developing the GUI in the coming months. You can expect our monthly OpenMDAO releases to include continual GUI improvements. To help us make the GUI more useful, we welcome any feedback you have about what you like or don’t like in the GUI. You can post any issues you find in our forum, or submit them directly to our github page.

This new release has several features, many of which are related to the rapidly-evolving GUI.  Among the highlights for this release are:

Framework changes:

• Printvars support added to CaseIteratorDriver
• Two new differentiators added. Note that they are still experimental and may not work for all models.

1. Chain Rule differentiator that implements forward algorithmic differentiation on a general workflow
2. Analytic differentiator that calculates the derivatives of a general workflow by assembling and solving a set of linear equations. This works for solver loops (coupled sensitivities) and can be executed in both forward and adjoint mode.

• Various bug fixes.

GUI Improvements: