Release v0.5.0 - Performance enhancements

This release of isatools focuses on implementing new performance enhancements to the existing API functionality:

• Bug fixes and minor enhancements in issues #147, #174 and #176
• Implementation of a wholesale replacement for the ISA-Tab parser, now found in theisatab.load() function, which loads ISA-Tab content into ISA model objects. This represents work towards harmonisation of the loading of ISA-Tab content into the same model as the ISA JSON loader, and a big improvement on loading performance (e.g. loading BII-I-1 test data down from 3.7s to 0.6s in tests using the timeit module) #168
• Implementation of a ISA JSON Encoder to write out ISA model objects to the ISA-JSON representation. This is implemented as the ISAJSONEncoder class that can be passed to the Python json package used to dump JSON.
• Integration of the new ISA-Tab loader and the new ISA JSON Encoder into the isatab2json converter #181
• Where the isatab2json is used elsewhere in the API, updates have been made to use the enhanced performance converter, where appropriate.

For more information on the known issues with this release, please check the documentation at http://isatools.readthedocs.org