[ImageJ-devel] Plugin development: should I start with ImageJ2 right away?

[Curtis Rueden]

Hi José,


> Now the question arises: should I start developing for ImageJ2 or will it
> be better for my sanity to stick to the "classical" ImageJ until ImageJ2
> comes out of the beta stage? How much refactoring will be waiting for me
> when I want to update my program if I choose the latter?


The current status of ImageJ2 is that it is quite stable now, and getting
more so every day. However, as you point out, it is still very much beta
software. While I believe the core architecture will not undergo major
design or API changes at this point, we are not making any guarantees about
it until the final release of 2.0.0.

I think it makes sense to begin exploring writing your code as ImageJ2
plugins. However, there are still major features missing from ImageJ2. For
example, we do not yet have many of ImageJ1's analysis capabilities such as
thresholding  or results tables.

Another aspect to consider is that ImageJ2 is trying to provide as backward
compatibility with ImageJ1. So if you write your code targeting ImageJ1,
the hope is that it will also work in ImageJ2, especially if it does not
have any custom or embedded UI/AWT logic.

All of that said, the reality is that if you want to write your code
against ImageJ2 either now in the future, you will be looking at some
amount of eventual refactoring, from either IJ1-to-IJ2 (if you initially
write it in the IJ1 framework) or from IJ2-to-IJ2 (if you initially write
it in the IJ2 beta framework).

Regards,
Curtis


On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 9:43 AM, José María Mateos <jmmateos at mce.hggm.es>wrote:

> Hello everybody,
>
> I started developing a clustering development framework targeted at
> dynamic nuclear medicine studies some months ago using an imaging platform
> different from ImageJ.
>
> Due to some "obscure" aspects of said platform, I'm thinking about moving
> the development of this framework and start building it on top of ImageJ.
>
> Now the question arises: should I start developing for ImageJ2 or will it
> be better for my sanity to stick to the "classical" ImageJ until ImageJ2
> comes out of the beta stage? How much refactoring will be waiting for me
> when I want to update my program if I choose the latter?
>
> Best,
>
> José María Mateos.
>
> --
> ImageJ mailing list: http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/list.**html<http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/list.html>
>
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