Skip to content

Compare SciJava Ops to ImageJ Ops #251

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
hinerm merged 1 commit into from
Aug 1, 2024
Merged

Compare SciJava Ops to ImageJ Ops #251

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
26 changes: 26 additions & 0 deletions docs/ops/doc/WhyOps.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -17,6 +17,32 @@ SciJava Ops takes strides to ease these burdens by separating the *what* ("I wan
6. **Extensibility**: Ops provides a mechanism for incorporating existing algorithm implementations into the framework code-free. Existing ops can always be extended in new directions or specialized for particular inputs.
7. **Performance**: The Ops framework provides a means to override any general-but-slow op with a faster-but-more-specific alternative and the execution framework adds minimal overhead.


## How does SciJava Ops compare with ImageJ Ops?

As an evolution of the [ImageJ Ops](https://imagej.net/libs/imagej-ops/) project, SciJava Ops adds many new features and makes many improvements. We first highlight how users can benefit by adopting SciJava Ops; we then provide benefits for developers who choose to write Ops to be exposed within the framework.

### User Features

1. [**Faster Matching**](Benchmarks.rst): SciJava Ops is able to match Ops to user requests dramatically faster than ImageJ Ops, and caches matching requests to provide virtually no overhead on re-requests.
2. **Precise Matching**: SciJava Ops uses the [Op builder pattern](CallingOps.md) to obtain precise knowledge about the user's desired Op inputs and outputs, leading to precise Op matches.
* *ImageJ Ops' `OpService.run` mechanism is vulnerable to uncertain return values and frequent result casting*.
3. **Simple API**: In SciJava Ops, each Op is **either** a `Function`, a `Computer`, or an `Inplace`, containing a **single method** that executes all functionality.
* *In ImageJ Ops, an Op might implement many different interfaces and expose redundant API*.
4. **Automatic Progress Updates**: SciJava Ops automatically records Op executions within the SciJava Progress framework, providing a simple mechanism for monitoring script execution.
* *In ImageJ Ops, Op execution is silent unless explicitly defined, and very few Ops do so.*

### Developer Features
1. **Zero-code Op Declaration**: Executable code can be registered as an Op purely through YAML specifications, allowing the induction of entire external libraries without upstream edits.
* *In ImageJ Ops, a separate class is required to wrap each algorithm from an external source*.
2. **Minimal Op Boilerplate**: Developers can choose to write Ops as Java classes, methods, or fields, depending on Op requirements.
* *In ImageJ Ops, a distinct class, including annotations and interface inheritance, is necessary for each Op*.
3. **Op Adaptation**: SciJava Ops can automatically iterate pixelwise algorithms across entire images, and can automatically create output buffers if the user does not provide one, **without any additional code**.
* *In ImageJ Ops, developers were required to program each additional way to call an Op to provide the same flexibility*.
4. **Full support for Java Generics**: Generic typing information baked into Java code enables SciJava Ops to consider each parameter's **generic** type in determining a match. This functionality allows developers to write separate Ops to specialize in increasingly narrow parameter types.
* *In ImageJ Ops, developers were required to encapsulate functionality within delegation Ops*.


## How do we integrate all of these different libraries and data structures?

Core to SciJava Ops is the observation that algorithmic data structures generally fall into a one of a set of "forms", including:
Expand Down