Three’s a charm: availability of Pathomation’s SDK for PHP

Why PHP?

It is not without pride that I’m announcing here the Pathomation SDK for PHP in addition to our earlier SDK releases for Python and Java.

The reason why we decided to add PHP to the mix is that much web-based software is written in PHP, and PHP is just much quicker to get something started in than Java (or Python). PHP is also the first library where we introduce a UI class, which wraps around PMA.UI, our JavaScript framework.

Our SDK therefore now support three environments, each for their own purposes:

  • PHP: web development
  • Java: back-end (J2EE) integration
  • Python: scripting, image analysis

This is not to say that you can’t use Python for web development, or Java for scripting. There’s some overlap, too. If you’re a seasoned PHP developer and you want to generate overnight reports of newly scanned slides, you may not find it worth the hassle to learn Python, just for this one-time task.

The important thing here is that we support all three languages, no matter what your preference is.

We’ve also dabbled a bit in Ruby (thank you Alexandr Kulinich!), but don’t see any concrete need (yet) to come out (and maintain) a formal SDK library for it, Contact us if you think we are wrong about this.

Seamless transitioning

Pathomation’s SDK interacts with both PMA.start as well as our commercial PMA.core offering. This was done to allow for painless transitioning from one environment to the next. If you decide to switch from PMA.startto its bigger brother PMA.core, you don’t have to re-learn anything. Just add authentication credentials when you establish your first PMA.core connection, and you’re good to go.