Re: ImageJ development involvement/contributions

Posted by David Webster on Dec 13, 2009; 3:10am
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/ImageJ-development-involvement-contributions-tp3690030p3690047.html

Grant,

Can you give us some examples of how plugins might have to change?

I have run across a few instances where plugins are availabe from the ImgaeJ
plugins page, but the authors no longer seem to be around.

David Webster
On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 2:51 PM, Grant Harris <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Dan,
> I appreciate your concerns and share them.  If ImageJ does not evolve in a
> way which  the community of developers and users follows, it will fail.  As
> you likely know, these concerns have been debated at length both in this
> mailing list and on the Google ImageJX discussion group
> (http://groups.google.com/group/imagejx).
> I've been working on how to refactor ImageJ for extensibility while
> maintaining backward compatibility for several years now.  The best I have
> been able to do thus far still requires minor changes to plug-ins; minor
> meaning that they could be accomplished with several find-and-replace
> operations in most cases.  I expect that the authors of most of the
> plug-ins
> would make these changes as necessary. And if not, I expect that a user of
> some obscure plug-in could find someone to make the change for them.
> From my experience and reading, software that succeeds in being used by a
> significant number of people eventually reaches a point where many of the
> initial design assumptions no longer hold and it becomes necessary to make
> some incompatible changes in order to evolve the software further.  My
> sense
> is that ImageJ is at that point.  If anyone can find a way to, for
> instance,
> decouple the GUI in a way that doesn't require any changes to plugins, I'm
> all ears.
> - Grant
>