Slicer3:Launcher

Requirements

One of the projects at the 2007 AHM was a review of the Slicer3 launcher.

A summary of the conculusions is:

• for the shared library plugins to work the application needs to be built in shared mode (not static)
• this means that shared library paths must be set before the application is started
• a launcher can do this -- it is a small program that does not have shared library dependencies that sets paths and then executes the main application

Some other nice things the launcher can do:

• since the launcher starts quickly, it can put up a splash screen for user feedback while the main program is loading
• the launcher can catch abnormal termination conditions of the main program and provide user feedback