Opticks - Software Development Kit (SDK)

4.8.0 Build 15482

Welcome

Welcome to Opticks plug-in development. The Opticks SDK allows you to create a variety of plug-ins, allowing you to add new capability to the base application. There are three major types of capability that you can add to Opticks as plug-ins:

• New Importers/Exporters - You can write importers that will load your custom data files into the application. You can also write exporters that will allow you to save analysis results from Opticks into your own file format.
• New Algorithms - You can write algorithms that will work directly on the data. These algorithms can create brand new data results or they can modify the raw image data in-place. These algorithms can also create new visualizations of the data, e.g. new views of the data, plots of the data.
• New Visualizations - You can write your own custom widgets using Qt, http://www.qtsoftware.com/products . These can be new dialogs, new dock windows, new modeless windows; all completely under your control and able to do anything that Qt can do.

Searching The Documentation

If you are reading this documentation in a web browser, you might want to consider reading the CHM (Microsoft Compiled Help) version of this documentation. The advantage of the CHM version is that the documentation can be searched. Look in the SDK_HOME/doc folder of the Windows SDK for the CHM version of this help. The CHM version is not available in the Solaris SDK because Solaris does not natively support reading CHM files. You can install xchm, http://xchm.sourceforge.net/, a free CHM viewer for Solaris, if you wish to read and use the CHM version on Solaris.

Creating A Plug-In

Please read Plug-In Development Tutorial, for a quick introduction to Opticks plug-in development that mainly focuses on creating new algorithms.

The tutorial should have given you a crash course in plug-in development by example. When creating your own plug-in, you'll need to:

1. Create a plug-in subclass, see Writing a plug-in class.
2. Register your plug-in with the application, see Registering your plug-in.
3. Compile your plug-in, see Compiling and Building Plug-Ins.
4. Run your plug-in with Opticks, see Running your plug-ins.

Upgrading From an Earlier SDK

If you have already written a plug-in for an earlier version of the SDK, please read Upgrading From Earlier SDK for details on upgrading to this version of the SDK.

More Help

For more help please see Overviews and HOWTOs or the Class documentation.

If you are looking for more sample plug-ins, you should look at the PlugInSampler, PlugInSamplerQt, PlugInSamplerHdf folders in SDK_HOME/application/PlugIns/src. COAN (Comprehensive Opticks Archive Network), available at http://github.com/tclarke/coan/tree/master also contains real-world examples of plug-ins. In addition, a large majority of the functionality included with Opticks is built using plug-ins. You can find the source code for these plug-ins on the Opticks website, at http://www.opticks.org/.