Frameworks for macros and plugins

We will look at some tools that ImageJ offers developers to deal with images and their processing. In the previous chapter, we looked at macros to perform common image-processing steps. This was already an improvement over the processing of time series one frame at a time, but ImageJ supports more tools and constructs that allow you to expand these basic tools further. In this chapter, we will look at some of these constructs as a preparation for the upcoming chapters, where we will look at plugins and their implementation.

ImageJ has two ways to process in a more automated fashion: macros and plugins. Besides the macros described in the previous chapter, ImageJ also supports other Java-based scripting languages such as Beanshell and JavaScript, as well as the scripting languages Python and Ruby, among others. The plugins can be split into two groups as well: plugins based on the original ImageJ (that is, ImageJ1.x plugins) and those based on the next development...