[SCIFIO] SCIFIO 0.7.4 Released today

[Mark Hiner]

Hi all,

 Today I released SCIFIO 0.7.4 - it can be downloaded directly from
GitHub<https://github.com/scifio/scifio/releases>,
and is part of pom-scijava
1.111<https://github.com/scijava/scijava-common/commit/4cb7d8d92810b173f18fadcc25e1567b9b3d2e1a>.
Side note: pom-scijava 1.111 also fixes a gav bug with scifio-lifesci, so
this version is now being tracked correctly (e.g. if you want to use the
updated SDTFormat<https://github.com/scifio/scifio-lifesci/blob/master/src/main/java/io/scif/lifesci/SDTFormat.java>
).

In addition to bug fixes and general improvements, I wanted to highlight a
few new features:

* Tools <https://github.com/scifio/scifio/tree/master/tools>! The
Bio-Formats command line tools have been ported to SCIFIO. In keeping with
SCIFIO theme, these tools now support dynamic command extension - via the
SCIFIOToolCommand<https://github.com/scifio/scifio/blob/master/tools/src/main/java/io/scif/tools/SCIFIOToolCommand.java>plugins.
Also, a lot of boilerplate is taken care of now in the abstract
layer, e.g. using args4j <http://args4j.kohsuke.org/> to print command
usage. I tried to adhere to Git syntax for using these tools, so I think it
feels pretty slick.

  I only ported show, info and convert for now. If you try implementing a
new command and have any questions or problems please e-mail me/the list!

  You can also download the latest
tools<http://jenkins.imagej.net/view/SCIFIO/job/SCIFIO/>from jenkins,
in
zip<http://jenkins.imagej.net/view/SCIFIO/job/SCIFIO/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/tools/target/scifio-tools-0.7.5-SNAPSHOT-scripts.zip>and
bz2<http://jenkins.imagej.net/view/SCIFIO/job/SCIFIO/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/tools/target/scifio-tools-0.7.5-SNAPSHOT-scripts.tar.bz2>flavors.

* New package: refs<https://github.com/scifio/scifio/commit/d8cad77b212d6faf7bf49471f5a3ffaf46c75c7d>.
This adds a RefManagerService<https://github.com/scifio/scifio/blob/master/scifio/src/main/java/io/scif/refs/RefManagerService.java>which
works in unison with the new
RefProvider<https://github.com/scifio/scifio/blob/master/scifio/src/main/java/io/scif/refs/RefProvider.java>plugin
type to manage references and perform cleanup operations  after they
are enqueued in a ReferenceQueue.

* Redesigned cache
functionality<https://github.com/scifio/scifio/commit/781ab8ef00845b6759d27ea2a9a60767505eeb5d>.
This is the result of our latest hackathon with Christian Dietz. A lot
happened here, so you can look at the related
issue<https://github.com/scifio/scifio/issues/69>and commit message
for the complete story. But to summarize, cache
performance was terrible and used some ill-advised Java practices. Now
(thanks to the RefManagerService, among other things) we're doing things
properly and performance is obscenely improved.

Thanks for reading this update. If you have any questions/comments, please
let me know.

- Mark
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