[MINC-development] MINC as a platform-independent portable web-friendly platform

[minc-development@bic.mni.mcgill.ca]

Hello,

If I may share a few, general thoughts....

I agree with Chris in recognizing the need to write portable software
that runs on a variety of computing platforms.  Ensuring portability and  platform-independence of medical imaging software should be a primary concern. These issues should be considered early in the design and development of the application software.

Also, I think that it is worthwhile to invest time in the early stages of development so that a software system (like MINC libraries, core and applications, in the actual layering) has built-in support for extensibility and modifiability to be able to handle future change in requirements (like the shift from minc 1.1 to 2.0). How ? Many design patterns address those requirements.

How to achieve portable software? One way is through the development/reuse of host infrastructure middleware that provides an OS abstraction layer that shields application software from the details of the underlying OS. I am thinking about things like ACE, for networked applications.

As for which language to use to implement the design, Java, being object-oriented and web-friendly, seems a good avenue.

My humble 2 cents...

Yves Roy