Slicer4

Overview

Slicer4 (officially 3D Slicer version 4) will be the next big development in the history of the 3D Slicer project. It's a big step which promises a lot of benefits. It's also an opportunity to adopt some new programming styles and break with a few past traditions. Overall though it should maintain the same spirit as earlier versions of slicer in a more modern wrapper.

Main Features

(Note that things will evolve as the project progresses).

• The biggest and most visible change is the outgrowth of the port of Slicer's GUI from KWWidgets to Qt.
• Increased focus on python as the main scripting interface
• Use of CMake external project feature (a.k.a. SuperBuild) as default build method
• Move from subversion repository to git
  • During the spring/summer of 2010 both repositories will exist in parallel. During summer of 2010 code from the subversion repository will be migrated into git (retaining all revision history).
  • Currently github is hosting the git repository, but it may move to another host in the future.
• Much of the infrastructure for the GUI will be developed jointly with the Common Toolkit (CTK) group.

Plan

• During April and May 2010 a majority of slicer developers will be working on the Slicer 3.6 release.
• Tutorials and breakout sessions will be held at the Summer Project Week in June.
• Bulk of developer effort will switch to Slicer4 during the last half of 2010
• 3D Slicer version 4.0 release date: TBD

Considerations for Developers

• Slicer3:3.6Release will be the last KWWidgets based release so all interfaces will need to be ported to Qt. Training and support will be provided to make this as painless as possible.
• Command Line Modules do not need to change
• Code in Libs and Base/Logic do not link to KWWidgets and do not need to change
• Tcl code is expected to run alongside Python code in a similar manner to the way Python and Tcl coexist in Slicer3