[Insight-users] ITKExamples feedback

[Matt McCormick]

Hi,

Inspired by the great work done mostly by David Doria and Bill
Lorensen with ITK examples on the wiki:

  http://itk.org/Wiki/ITK/Examples

We (ITK community members) are working on an improved examples
infrastructure, and we would appreciate feedback and involvement.  The
project is in early stages, and contributions are welcome with the
understanding that drastic changes may still occur.

Currently,

- The project is hosted on GitHub:

  https://github.com/InsightSoftwareConsortium/ITKExamples

- The nightly rendered documentation can be found at

  http://itk.org/ITKExamples/

-  The only dependency to build and run all the examples is CMake/ITK
(and there is an ITK Superbuild).:

  http://itk.org/ITKExamples/Build/index.html#build-all-examples-and-the-documentation

-  Examples are organized by the "main" ITK class Group and Module's
location within the modular ITKv4 tree, followed by a name
corresponding to the question the title answers (the Trebek Title
Method).

  http://itk.org/ITKExamples/Contribute/WriteANewExample.html#title

- Data is kept out of the Git repository by using Midas to store the images:

  http://itk.org/ITKExamples/Contribute/UploadBinaryData.html

- There is a search:

  http://itk.org/ITKExamples/search.html

-  There is an index:

  http://itk.org/ITKExamples/genindex.html

- There are dashboard systems that check running the examples,
baseline image regression tests, external hyperlink checks, and
building in html, pdf, and epub:

  http://open.cdash.org/index.php?project=Insight&filtercount=1&showfilters=1&field1=groupname/string&compare1=63&value1=Examples

- GitStats is run nightly and displayed prominently to give credit to
the code authors:

  http://itk.org/ITKExamples/gitstats/authors.html

- Examples are written in C++ and Python.

- Tarballs are available for each individual example that contain all
the required CMakeLists.txt, code, and data to build and run an
example.:

  http://itk.org/ITKExamples/Download/index.html#individual-examples

- The entire example repository can be downloaded in source form via
Git, HTML tarball, PDF file, or EPUB file:

  http://itk.org/ITKExamples/Download/index.html

- We have outstanding issues listed in the Github Issue Tracker

  https://github.com/InsightSoftwareConsortium/ITKExamples/issues

- The class documentation for each important class demonstrated in an
example is extracted from Doxygen and links are automatically
generated to the Doxygen class HTML documentation.


In the future (maybe),

- The file naming scheme will be changed to reduce build errors on Windows.

- The project will be hosted on itk.org.

- Patches will go through the same Gerrit Code Review instance that
the ITK repository uses.

- Web-browser based contribution is with a system like vcwebedit:

  http://vcwebedit.org/_edit_configuration.html

- Issues can be tracked at issues.itk.org

- Interactive web-based visualization (with no dependencies) is
possible with XTK

  https://github.com/xtk/X


Thanks,
Matt