[ImageJ-devel] ModuleService.run

[Lee Kamentsky]

Hi Curtis, all,
I'm looking at ModuleService.run and thinking of how to use it in 
CellProfiler. There's a comment:
// TODO - Implement a better threading mechanism for launching modules.
// Perhaps a ThreadService so that the UI can query currently
// running modules and so forth?

which is pretty relevant. I think that the natural thing to do would be 
to return java.util.concurrent.Future<Map<String, Object>> which would 
be a future promising the map of outputs for the module. You'd wrap the 
ModuleRunner in a java.util.concurrent.Callable<Map<String, Object>> 
instead of in a Runnable and use java.util.concurrent.FutureTask to 
return the future.

I like a programmatic style myself where you do things step-by-step 
instead of an event-driven style like a ThreadService. This would be 
great for scripting - you can imagine a script that executes a module, 
then, further down, gets the results from the execution. The script 
would proceed in parallel with the module execution and the additional 
boilerplate for threading would be minimal - just an additional call to 
Future.get() at the point where the result was needed.

--Lee