OpenLayers 3 + Microscopy

Hacks and patches to OpenLayers 3 to support several microscopy image servers.

Rich Stoner, WholeSlide Inc, 2014

To preview some neat examples:

1. Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/wholeslide/ol3.git

2. Open a terminal window

3. Run a simple webserver from the build folder

cd build/hosted/olmicroscope

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

4. Visit http://localhost:8000 in your web browser

Examples include:

1. Leica / Aperio image viewer with annotation support
2. MicroBrightField Biolucida image viewer
3. MicroBrightField Biolucida image viewer with Z support
4. MicroBrightField Biolucida image viewer with Z support and image adjustment (webgl only)

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Below are instructions on how to build the library from scratch. These were pulled from the OL3 contributing documentation

Development dependencies

The minimum requirements are:

• Git
• Node.js
• Python 2.6 or 2.7 with a couple of extra modules (see below)
• Java 7 (JRE and JDK)

The executables git, java, jar, and python should be in your PATH.

You can check your configuration by running:

$ ./build.py checkdeps

To install the Node.js dependencies run

$ npm install

To install the extra Python modules, run:

$ sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

or

$ cat requirements.txt | sudo xargs easy_install

depending on your OS and Python installation.

Working with the build tool

As an ol3 developer you will need to use the build.py Python script. This is the script to use to run the linter, the compiler, the tests, etc. Windows users can use build.cmd which is a thin wrapper around build.py.

The build.py script is equivalent to a Makefile. It is actually based on pake, which is a simple implementation of make in Python.

The usage of the script is:

$ ./build.py <target>

where <target> is the name of the build target you want to execute. For example:

$ ./build.py test

The main build targets are serve, lint, build, test, and check. The latter is a meta-target that basically runs lint, build, and test.

The serve target starts a node-based web server, which we will refer to as the dev server. You'll need to start that server for running the examples and the tests in a browser. More information on that further down.

Other targets include apidoc and ci. The latter is the target used on Travis CI. See ol3's Travis configuration file.

Running the check target

The check target is to be run before pushing code to GitHub and opening pull requests. Branches that don't pass check won't pass the integration tests, and have therefore no chance of being merged into master.

To run the check target:

$ ./build.py check

If you want to run the full suite of integration tests, see "Running the integration tests" below.

Running examples

To run the examples you first need to start the dev server:

$ ./build.py serve

Then, just point your browser http://localhost:3000/examples in your browser. For example http://localhost:3000/examples/side-by-side.html.

Run examples against the ol.js standalone build:

The examples can also be run against the ol.js standalone lib, just like the examples hosted on GitHub. Start by executing the host-examples build target:

$ ./build.py host-examples

After running host-examples you can now open the examples index page in the browser, for example: http://localhost/~elemoine/ol3/build/hosted/master/examples/. (This assumes that the hosted directory is a web directory, served by Apache for example.)

Append ?mode=raw to make the example work in full debug mode. In raw mode the OpenLayers and Closure Library scripts are loaded individually by the Closure Library's base.js script (which the example page loads and executes before any other script).