Redesign core I/O infrastructure

[curtis]

ImageJ's current I/O infrastructure is largely built around the ij.io.FileInfo class. It generally assumes it is reading from a file, has many specialized considerations for TIFF and other formats, and is generally not modular in its design. There is also no real way to extend ImageJ's core I/O support other than to hack a special plugin called HandleExtraFileTypes, which has a number of limitations and disadvantages.

In contrast, the Bio-Formats library was designed with extensibility in mind. We propose a core ImageJ I/O package, similar to loci.formats, with IFormatReader- and IFormatWriter-like interfaces, to make it easier to extend ImageJ's file format support in a general way. Plugins implementing the correct interface would be automatically detected as new supported file types, and work out of the box with the ImageJ "Open" command.

[curtis]

By the alpha1 release, we want File > Open to work extensibly, as well as File > Save. Both should have file filters based on the discovered I/O plugins.

[curtis]

This is not going to make it into 2.0-alpha2. Will shoot for 2.0-alpha3.

[curtis]

See also ticket #100.

[curtis]

(In #1081) See also #516.