Architecture

In this section, you will learn how to extend the functionality of the Cytomine platform or develop new features.

If you don't know Cytomine yet, follow the Getting Started page in the user guide to have a tour and discover the main concepts of Cytomine.

The Cytomine project is composed of multiple services, each implemented using different programming languages, which interact with one another to provide the full functionality of the platform. You can contribute to one or more services of the Cytomine platform based on your skills and expertise. Please see the How to contribute guide to explore the various ways of improving Cytomine and contributing effectively and our Contributor Code of Conduct.

Community Edition 2023.1

• Core (opens new window).This service contains the programming logic, object representations, dependencies, and access permissions. The Core service is also responsible for connecting to the databases. It is developed using the Spring Boot (opens new window) framework.
• PIMS (opens new window). This service is the image management system and is connected to the storage disk. Imported images on Cytomine are handled by this service. It is also responsible to return the tiles displayed in the viewer when you browse an image as well as the thumbnails and annotation crops. It is developed in Python.
• Web-UI (opens new window). This service is our officially supported front-end. It is a Web User Graphical Interface developed in VueJS. All graphical services you see during your Cytomine browser navigation are implemented here.
• The external clients API libraries (currently Javascript (opens new window), Python (opens new window) and Java (opens new window)). As Cytomine is a RESTful platform, it is possible to interact with a Cytomine instance with HTTP(S) requests and without using a graphical interface. Clients are libraries developed to help you to integrate interactions with Cytomine in your scripts or your applications. As we know, the Java client is mostly used for integration in other applications, the Python client is used for IA researchers and scripting and the Javascript client is used to build Web User Interface.

Community Edition Legacy

The main services of Cytomine are:

• Core (opens new window). This service embeds the programming logic, the object representations, their dependencies and the access permissions. Core is also the service connected to the databases. It was developed using the Grails (opens new window) framework.
• PIMS (opens new window). This service is the image management system and is connected to the storage disk. Imported images on Cytomine are handled by this service. It is also responsible to return the tiles displayed in the viewer when you browse an image as well as the thumbnails and annotation crops. It is developed in Python.
• Web-UI (opens new window). This service is our officially supported front-end. It is a Web User Graphical Interface developed in VueJS. All graphical services you see during your Cytomine browser navigation are implemented here.
• The external clients API libraries (currently Javascript (opens new window), Python (opens new window) and Java (opens new window)). As Cytomine is a RESTful platform, it is possible to interact with a Cytomine instance with HTTP(S) requests and without using a graphical interface. Clients are libraries developed to help you to integrate interactions with Cytomine in your scripts or your applications. As we know, the Java client is mostly used for integration in other applications, the Python client is used for IA researchers and scripting and the Javascript client is used to build Web User Interface.

The interactions between these services are shown here: