Hi !
Few days ago, a new stable version 11.0.3 of FW4SPL has been released !!!
Version tagging
As you might notice we dropped the first version number, which was 0 since the birth of the software 15 years ago. At some point we realized that we will never dare to release a 1.0 version, so we simply removed the first digit. Three digits are anyway more than enough to tag a version. We renamed all our previous tags accordingly.
This version naming change also comes with a new release policy. We plan to tag new versions much more frequently, almost every month. However, stability will not be sacrified since we are improving our code review process and our continous integration pipeline.
VCS change
What’s new ?
The 11.0 branch started almost one year ago, so this release brings a lot of changes. As previously announced, this branch focuses on simplifying the framework for the developers.
appXml2
The main change towards that goal is the support of multiple objects on a service. Since the beginning, services were designed to work on a single data, i.e. an image. To work on multiple objects, i.e. an image and a reconstruction, a service had to work on a composite data, which contains other objects, here the image and the reconstruction. This indirection was the cause of an unecessary complexity and led to introduce obscure concepts.
With FW4SPL 11.0.3, services can directly work on multiple data without any indirection. The objects can be accessed as input (read-only), input/output (read/write) or output (write-only). This makes objects use safer and easier to understand. It is also much simpler to connect objects signals to services slots. To help the migration, we introduced a new bundle called appXml2 that allows to write xml configurations using services with several objects. The deprecated appXml is still supported in 11.x series but will be removed in 12.x.
All applications, most tutorials and samples have been ported to the new appXml2.
Activity wizard
A new service called SActivityWizard has been introduced to ease the data selection of activities. Before that, it was sometimes hard to know what was the necessary data to launch an activity. The wizard helps in this process by automatically prompting the user to provide the data for each requirement. On top of that, we generalized the loading and saving of activities so in most applications we can load a previously saved activity and thus skip the data selection process.
Third-party libraries
We always use the best and the latest open-source software. FW4SPL 11.0.3 is shipped with:
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Qt 5.7
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VTK 7.0
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Boost 1.61
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OpenCV 3.2.0