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

[Sascha Zelzer]

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

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