While the details of the implementation have yet to be finalized, a few of the design principles have been decided by the founding group. In particular, several core libraries will serve as the foundation.

Overall object structure will be based on Qt 4.5

http://www.qtsoftware.com/

See the [wiki:WidgetPlans Widget Plans page]. See the [wiki:CodingGuidelines Coding Guidelines page].

DICOM support will be implemented using DCMTK

http://dicom.offis.de/dcmtk

Visualization will use VTK

http://www.vtk.org

Analysis algorithms will use ITK

http://www.itk.org

Software engineering methodology will follow the ITK style (leveraging CMake and friends)

http://www.cmake.org

A To-be-determined wrapping tool will support calling CTK from Python, Tcl, Java, C#, etc

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Open Questions

• Qt Script (javascript) provides a subset of “traditional” VTK-style wrapping. PyQt is GPL so not usable in CTK. What are the other alternatives?
  ** Perhaps PythonQt - it is LGPL and lighter (less complete) than PyQt. It is a product of the MeVisLab effort. ** PySide appears to be the nokia-sponsored replacement for PyQt.

• What third party widget libraries exist for Qt? What licenses do they use? (Since the open source version of Qt was GPL until recently, most third party libraries are probably GPL also). For example, the QDCWS project combines DCMTK with Qt but is GPL (and no longer active, apparently - email to the developer bounced).