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Hi Martin,

On Wed, 26 Mar 2014, Martin Offterdinger wrote:

> I am interested to hear if anyone is aware about the status of the
> ImageJ2 project?

Thank you for your interest!

> There were always some news on the website, but since several months it
> seems to be rather dead there? No information several beta versions
> delayed many months...

There have been some changes in the development team, and that is
naturally followed by a couple of weeks/months of restructuring the
project.

It is not dead, though! ;-)

> Is it still continued the whole project?

We concentrated a little bit more on infrastructure, to make it possible
to maintain this hugely modular project with less effort. We are almost
done with those changes and they already help us move faster, but of
course those changes took time.

We also concentrated on lower-level software architecture; For example,
there has been a recent, hugely successful hackathon hosted by KNIME in
Konstanz resulting in an elegant architecture to allow design of efficient
algorithms (we did not yet come around to finish up some loose ends and
send out a summary to the ImageJ mailing list; I am actually working on
this as we speak). This architecture will be used both by KNIME and
ImageJ2.

And we also focused more on use cases, such as running ImageJ 1.x plugins
in non-graphical settings. Just imagine a cloud application wanting to run
multiple ImageJ 1.x macros in parallel -- there are many scientists who
would benefit from such a setup. Due to ImageJ 1.x' implementation
details, this is not possible: macros would interfere with each other. The
ImageJ2 project came up with a (partial) solution called ij1-patcher. It
is one example where fundamental work done in the ImageJ2 project benefits
many more projects.

Let me add a teaser: we also work on making it possible to run ImageJ2
plugins in ImageJ 1.x. By necessity, this support will be limited (ImageJ
1.x can handle only three data types and only up to five dimensions and is
also limited by RAM in how large images it can handle), but it will most
likely let users benefit from all the work we have done.

So you see, we have been quite busy. The benefits are of course less
immediately visible to the user than a GUI redesign would be, but I am
convinced that it is important ground work we accomplish right now that
will serve us well for years to come. As a scientist, you will probably
appreciate that such fundamental work might look less sexy, but is
crucial for future developments.

Ciao,
Johannes