General

Introduction

The framework FW4SPL (FrameWork for Software Production) is an open-source framework, developed by IRCAD (research institute against cancer and disease). The purpose of FW4SPL is to ease the creation of applications in the medical imaging field. Therefore it provides features like digital image processing in 2D and 3D, visualization or simulation of medical interactions.

FW4SPL is based on a component architecture composed of C++ libraries. The three main concepts of the architecture, explained in the following sections, are:

• object-service concept
• component approach
• signal-slot communication

The framework is multi-platform and runs under Windows, Linux, MacOS and Android. Building an application with FW4SPL only requires to write one or several XML files. Its functionalities can be also extended by writing new components in C++, which is the coding language of the framework.

This document will introduce the general architecture of FW4SPL.