Page history Edit this page How do I edit this website?

2015-07-27 - Janelia Hackathon

From Sunday, July 27, 2015 through Friday, July 31, 2015, Stephan Saalfeld at HHMI Janelia in Ashburn, Virginia hosted LOCI’s Curtis Rueden and Mark Hiner for a hackathon to unify SCIFIO/ImgLib2 development efforts (with MPI-CBG’s Tobias Pietzsch), improve support for the Janelia KLB format (with Janelia’s Burkhard Hoeckendorf), and improve the development tools available for Fiji developers.

Executive summary

  • SCIFIO is headed in a great direction:
    • Will integrate it better into modern, powerful software tools including ImgLib2 and BigDataViewer.
    • Big step toward breaking the limitations of ImageJ 1.x, in particular the 2GPix plane barrier and limited image types.
    • Will make possible things like more transparent and rapid ability to work with multi-position and multi-angle datasets (mosaics, light sheet, etc.).
  • Stability of ImageJ and Fiji—and other applications built on SciJava components—is now easier to validate.

Technical discussions

  • Unify BigDataViewer and SCIFIO/SciJava cell caches, and caching in general
  • Unify SCIFIO and ImgLib2 metadata data structures
  • Improve Maven tooling for releases and testing.
  • KLB block-based file format:
    • Generalize SCIFIO’s core API to use N-D blocks instead of planes.
    • Consider pure Java implementation of KLB to avoid native lib issues.
    • Enable multithreaded I/O in SCIFIO as painlessly as possible.

Progress this week

  • Curtis wrote a “melting pot” script for testing component changes in the context of a larger application (e.g.: “Would this change to TrakEM2 break Fiji?”) [1].
  • Curtis made some ImageJ improvements in response to feedback from Burkhard [2, 3].
  • Mark fixed bugs in SCIFIO cell caching in preparation for unification [4].
  • Mark and Curtis planned out the new SCIFIO API for “blockization”.
  • Mark began work on ImageJ data model changes for SCIFIO “blockization” [5, 6].

Future directions

  • Jenkins automation of melting-pot for Fiji testing.
  • Wiki documentation on how to use the melting-pot for testing your components.
  • Completion of development on the SCIFIO “blockization” and unification of ImgLib2 data structures and caching.
  • Convert KLB native code to a pure Java SCIFIO format implementation.