Developing v3 of the OpenFlexure software

Announcements
#1

As the software counterpart to v7 of the hardware, we are planning for the next major release. This won’t be as dramatic an overhaul as v7 of the microscope, but will have some substantial new features and may have breaking API changes. Currently, the plan is to focus on reliability and security:

  • Plugins will be much easier to install and manage, which should mean more functionality is easy to access.
  • The microscope configuration will be set at start-up by a configuration file, and clear error messages will tell you what’s wrong if it is not consistent with your hardware. This should eliminate the confusion that results from the microscope quietly starting up with an emulated stage, for example.
  • We’ll make provision for some level of authentication on the HTTP interface, which makes the microscope much safer to use on larger networks.

It would be good to hear from anyone with ideas on what should be addressed. This is a particularly good moment to think about changes that can’t easily be made backwards-compatible. So, if there are architectural changes you’d like to see or features that have been annoying you for ages, by all means post here. Our current thinking is that we’ll work on the features above and release an alpha as soon as we can, even if it’s not feature-complete. That way, we can get some feedback on the new features while we work on other things.

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#2

A less exciting but no less important point is that a number of API changes will probably be needed in order to tidy up the code - e.g. the arguments to the “scan” action will be reorganised, so they can be passed around the microscope server more cleanly. Refactoring the code to make it cleaner, more modular, more testable, and generally more reliable will probably end up being the bulk of the work, though I guess if we do it well, it will be hard for most people using the software to notice!

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