Make OME ImageJ plugins available via an OME update site

[crueden-x]

Fiji supports third party update sites. Relevant articles:

• For producers: ​How to set up and populate an update site
• For consumers: ​How to follow a 3rd party update site

It would be great to serve our ImageJ plugins (OMERO.insight initially, and ultimately the Bio-Formats plugins too), via our own OME update site.

Publishing the OMERO.insight plugin in this way should hopefully be very straightforward.

Regarding the Bio-Formats plugins, the main obstacle with migrating them out of the core Fiji update site is that several other core Fiji plugins currently depend on it. However, it may be possible in the future for update sites to be cross-linked in this manner; or else we will find another reasonable solution after further discussion.

[mlinkert]

See also: ​http://trac.imagej.net/ticket/1452

[jamoore]

Closed duplicate #12167

[crueden-x]

This ticket is rather out of date, so here's an update:

• The Fiji update site currently serves Bio-Formats stable releases. Currently this is Bio-Formats 5.0.0.
• The ​Bio-Formats update site serves the latest build from dev_5_0, and it kept updated nightly by Jenkins.
• There will soon be an OMERO-5.0 update site that serves the ​ImageJ-OMERO interoperability library and dependencies, which will include OMERO. With some additional effort, that update site could also be made to serve the ​Insight-based OMERO ImageJ plugin.
• In the longer term, all plugins served on the Fiji update site will be refactored to use SCIFIO. This means that Bio-Formats stable releases will not necessarily need to be distributed via the core Fiji update site, but could instead be distributed on its own update site. This update site could be a third update site enabled by default in the Fiji distribution, so users would not notice any change. But structurally it would be a cleaner separation.

[crueden-x]

The OMERO-5.0 update site ​now exists, so I'm going to close this ticket as fixed. It does not serve the OMERO.insight ImageJ plugin, but I'm much less concerned about that, given the new burgeoning ​ImageJ-OMERO interoperability, which will be the preferred method of using ImageJ with OMERO both client and server side.