🎉 bigtree 1.0.0 — A new paradigm: Tree, BinaryTree, and DAG wrappers

[kayjan]

I'm thrilled to announce bigtree v1.0.0, a major milestone in the project's journey. This release introduces 3 powerful wrapper-style classes - Tree, BinaryTree, and DAG which encapsulate the construction, export, search, utility APIs, making your work with hierarchical structures more intuitive and expressive.

🆕 What’s new in 1.0.0

Wrapper-first API: Tree, BinaryTree, DAG

• The new classes act as facades over node-level operations, giving you a high-level interface for the full structure:
  • Construction from string, list, dictionary, DataFrame, etc.
  • Exporting (to string, list, dictionary, DataFrame, dot, image, pyvis, etc.)
  • Search, query, parsing, traversal, and utilities
• They wrap around the existing node-level building blocks, preserving flexibility while improving usability.

🚀 Why this matters

• Cleaner, more declarative code — instead of wiring individual function calls, you now drive the full structure via a single object with rich methods
• Better discovery & usability — the wrapper classes collect and expose the most common patterns you would need (construct, search, export)
• Backward-compatible flexibility — you can still use lower-level Node APIs if you want, but the wrappers drastically lower the friction for everyday workflows
• Unified abstractions — whether you are dealing with general trees, binary trees, or DAGs, the patterns stay consistent and easy to remember

✅ Migration and backward compatibility

Existing code that builds using Node, list_to_tree, dict_to_tree, etc., will continue to work.
In most cases, switching to the wrapper class is straightforward:

# Before
from bigtree import list_to_tree, tree_to_dataframe
root = list_to_tree(data, ...)
tree_data = tree_to_dataframe(root, ...)

# After
from bigtree import Tree
tree = Tree.from_list(data, ...)
tree_data = tree.to_dataframe(...)

All existing node-level APIs (e.g. node.children, node.parent) remain intact.

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I hope this new release bridges the gap between low-level control and high-level ergonomics. I'd love your feedback: try out v1.0.0, browse the updated docs, and let me know what works (or what could be smoother). Thank you to everyone who has contributed, tested, and supported bigtree so far. Here’s to the future of working with hierarchical data in Python! 🥂