Pathway

Added
- `%:z` timezone format code to `strptime`.
- Support for Airbyte connectors `pw.io.airbyte`.

Added
- Introduced the `send_alerts` function in the `pw.io.slack` namespace, enabling users to send messages from a specified column directly to a Slack channel.
- Enhanced the `pw.io.http.rest_connector` by introducing an additional argument called `request_validator`. This feature empowers users to validate payloads and raise an `HTTP 400` error if necessary.

Fixed
- Addressed an issue in `pw.io.xpacks.llm.VectorStoreServer` where the computation of the last modification timestamp for an indexed document was incorrect.

Changed
- Improved the behavior of `pw.io.kafka.write`. It now includes retries when sending data to the output topic encounters failures.

Added
- `pw.io.http.rest_connector` now supports multiple HTTP request types.
- `pw.io.http.PathwayWebserver` now allows Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) to be enabled on newly added endpoints
- Wrappers for LiteLLM and HuggingFace chat services and SentenceTransformers embedding service are now added to Pathway xpack for LLMs.

Changed
- `pw.run` now includes an additional parameter `runtime_typechecking` that enables strict type checking at runtime.
- Embedders in pathway.xpacks.llm.embedders now correctly process empty strings as queries.
- **BREAKING**: `pw.run` and `pw.run_all` now only accept keyword arguments.

Fixed
- `pw.Duration` can now be returned from User-Defined Functions (UDFs) or used as a constant value without resulting in errors.
- `pw.io.debezium.read` now correctly handles tables that do not have a primary key.

Added
- `pw.io.http.rest_connector` can now generate Open API 3.0.3 schema that will be returned by the route ``/_schema``.
- Wrappers for OpenAI Chat and Embedding services are now added to Pathway xpack for LLMs.
- A vector indexing pipeline that allows querying for the most similar documents. It is available as class `VectorStore` as part of Pathway xpack for LLMs.

Fixed
- `pw.debug.table_from_markdown` now uses schema parameter (when set) to properly assign _simple types_ (`int, bool, float, str, bytes`) and optional _simple types_ to columns.

Changed
- `pw.io.http.rest_connector` now also accepts port as a string for backwards compatibility.
- `pw.stdlib.ml.index.KNNIndex` now sorts by distance by default.

Added
- Support for comparisons of tuples has been added.
- Standalone versions of methods such as `pw.groupby`, `pw.join`, `pw.join_inner`, `pw.join_left`, `pw.join_right`, and `pw.join_outer` are now available.
- The `abs` function from Python can now be used on Pathway expressions.
- The `asof_join` method now has configurable temporal behavior. The `behavior` parameter can be used to pass the configuration.
- The state of the `deduplicate` operator can now be persisted.

Changed
- `interval_join` can now work with intervals of zero length.
- The `pw.io.http.rest_connector` can now open multiple endpoints on the same port using a new `pw.io.http.PathwayWebserver` class.
- The `pw.xpacks.connectors.sharepoint.read` and `pw.io.gdrive.read` methods now support the size limit for a single object. If set, it will exclude too large files and won't read them.