Dear All-
A quick update on our progress towards releasing OMERO and Bio-Formats 4.4.
As always, our roadmap and progress are posted at
http://trac.openmicroscopy.org.uk/ome/roadmap
The most important changes in 4.4 for users are:
-- enabling "change group"
-- enhancement of Permissions that control data access and sharing
-- substantial update of the web UI
-- improved integration with ImageJ
-- Big Image enhancements
For developers and admins, there's a lot going on beneath the hood:
-- support for ICE 3.4
-- upgraded many core libraries
-- multi-group support
-- Web infrastructure rationalisation
-- webstart
We hope to have a Release Candidate ("RC") by the end of next week.
One major body of work that we are NOT releasing (at least in OMERO) is updates to the core model that support ROIs and some other data types. The code data model used in Bio-Formats will be updated (formally to OME Data Model 2012-06), but this update will not occur in OMERO (we have a way to bridge OMERO and Bio-Formats with different data models, don't worry!). This is because we simply didn't want to break all of the clients that are built against an OMERO 4.3.x API, including our own. Our first goal is to deliver new and improved functionality— we'll clean up some of the underlying issues in a later release.
For those of you who are following along, you can see all the gory details at:
http://trac.openmicroscopy.org.uk/ome/milestone/OMERO-Beta4.4
and get the goods at:
http://hudson.openmicroscopy.org.uk/
For everyone else, just give us a few more days, and we should be done with all the testing, etc.
As always, thanks for your support.
Cheers,
Jason
