OptSuite is based on the Eclipse RCP which provides a framework for extension. This section aims to shortly describe the concepts of the RCP extension mechanism and then outline the extension potentials of OptSuite.

Eclipse provides a powerful plugin architecture. A plugin in Eclipse is the smalles unit of the Eclipse Platform. Mainly plugins consist of some Java classes usually packed into a jar file and one or more descriptors (plugin.xml and MANIFEST.MF). The descriptors define the interconnections with other plugins. It can define dependencies to other plugins, extension-points and extensions to extension-points defined by other plugins.

Each plugin in Eclipse can define so called extension-points. The plugin defining the extension-point hereby defines an interface for other plugins to interact with the functionality provided by that plugin. Extension points are defined as XML-Schema and extension to that point will be declared in XML format in the extending plugin’s plugin.xml. Point specific xml elements and attributes control the behavoir or configuration of the extension.

The Eclipse Platform itself defines several extension-points used by OptSuite. For example OptSuite defines an extension to the application extension-point defined by the eclipse runtime plugin to be able to appear as own application. OptSuite extends much more points such as Views, Preferences, Menus, Actions etc. ...

OptSuite now provides several extension points as well which are used to perform tasks specific to (optical) measurement and instrument control. The next sections briefly describe the most important extension-points of OptSuite and their concepts.

OptSuite’s extension-points are roughly structured into three major parts: data-acquisition, data-analysis and data-visualisation. As mentioned in the discussion of OptSuite’s concepts most functionality can be brought into OptSuite encapsulated within an measurement routine step. Routinesteps are used for all tasks in the platform (acquisition, analysis and visualisation). However, several specific extension-points exist for the different use cases, such as acquisitionAlgorithms, or intensityDetectors for data-acquisition, or dataAnalyser for analysis. The extension-points of each module are described in more detail in the documentation for the specific module or in the schema file of the extension-point directly (see *.xsd).