[Insight-developers] Slicer4/ITKv4 update

[Bill Lorensen]

Folks,

Last week, I attended NA-MIC Project week in Salt Lake City:
http://na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/2011_Winter_Project_Week#Projects

Luis and I submitted a project: Slicer4-ITK4 Continuous Integration

The project was well received and the final results are excellent.
Please visit the link for a detailed summary:
http://na-mic.org/Wiki/index.php/2011_Winter_Project_Week:_Slicer4-ITK4_Continuous_Integration

We learned a number of lessons that will be valuable as we move forward:

1) No matter how trivial the API change, the impact on a customer's
build can be significant. The first Slicer4/ITKv4 build had over 600
compilation errors.
2) None of the ITKv4 changes that affected Slicer4 have migration documents.
3) Some ITKv4 API changes made us rethink and compromise the ITKv4 API
changes. For example changes to Rigid3DTransform.
4) Some ITK4 API changes reminded us of some old changes that should
have been propagated into Slicer3/4 (e.g. Replace OStringStream with
std::stringstream).
5) We found some errors in Slicer4 classes (itkWarpTransform3D).

As a result of this project, the Slicer4 development team plans to use
ITKv4 for its first release in Fall 2011. This coincides with the
planned release for ITKv4.

The next step in this project is to provide a nightly dashboard that
tracks both Slicer4 and ITKv4 changes.

Bill