[Ctk-developers] CTK announcement: command line module support

[Yves Martelli]

Dear All,

Continuing the interoperability efforts regarding the Command Line
Interface (CLI), we had a fruitful third VPH NoE Imaging workshop in
Lyon last week where we tested the integration of several CLI modules
in various CLI compatible frameworks. This allowed us to find some
differences in the implementation of the Slicer CLI standard and lay a
base for modules and framework testing. You can find our notes and
some snapshots of the integrations on this wiki page:

http://www.commontk.org/index.php/Documentation/CLI_In_Context

These tests were for the frameworks that I know implement the CLI, if
you have heard of others please tell us. The same about similar
interoperability testing. I hope to continue this work during the next
CTK hackfest in Bologna in December.

So long,
Yves

-----Original Message-----
From: Sascha Zelzer [mailto:s.zelzer at dkfz-heidelberg.de]
Sent: viernes, 14 de septiembre de 2012 17:51
Subject: CTK announcement: command line module support

Hi CTK developers and interoperability enthusiasts,

I would like to announce the immediate availability of a set of
support libraries in CTK which aim at easing the process of
integrating command line modules in existing or new applications. For
an overview of the new features, please see

http://www.commontk.org/docs/html/CommandLineModules_Page.html

and the wiki page here

http://www.commontk.org/index.php/Documentation/Command_Line_Interface

Here is some more background information:

Since many years, Slicer [1] is capable of interfacing with command
line modules and to automatically generate a GUI [2] from an XML
description of the modules parameters [3]. Because of the very loose
coupling (via command line arguments), the potential reuse of such
command line modules is very high. However, other (medical imaging)
toolkits and applications needed to invest quite some development time
if they wanted to support a similar feature set. For example, Gimias
[4] implemented a Slicer compatible command line module support [5].

Therefore, two years ago at the CTK Hackfest in Barcelona [6], the
work on a toolkit independent command line module support library
began.
Along the same line, interoperability of software modules has been
discussed at a VPH workshop in 2011 [7] and command line modules have
been identified as a promising, low-barrier integration approach.

Finally, a couple of Hackfests later and with the help of many
developers (among them Julien Finet, Xavier Planes, Yves Martelli, and
Matt Clarkson) we can now provide a stable, feature-rich, and
customizable set of libraries which should make the handling of
command line modules and the automatic GUI generation
straight-forward.

A currently developed MITK plug-in by Matt Clarkson from University
College London successfully uses the CTK libraries to provide support
for command line module handling in MITK [8].

In the near future, we (the medical imaging community) are hopefully
able to re-use such command line modules in a variety of toolkits and
applications, making existing and new modules accessible to a broad
range of researchers and end-users.


Best regards,

Sascha Zelzer


[1]: http://www.slicer.org
[2]: http://wiki.slicer.org/slicerWiki/index.php/File:Slicer4-ACPC.jpeg
[3]: http://www.slicer.org/slicerWiki/index.php/Slicer3:Execution_Model_Documentation
[4]: http://gimias.org/
[5]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KBRfeuZLBAM#!
[6]: http://www.commontk.org/index.php/CTK-Hackfest-September-2010
[7]: http://www-sop.inria.fr/asclepios/events/VPHimaging11/organisation.htm
[8]: See attached file MITK_CLI.png