dcm4chee-arc-light vs the 2.x series, which should I use and has the latter officially been discontinued?

[David Simic]

Dear colleagues,

I’ve been using dcm4chee for some time now, specifically the 2.18.x series (and blogging about it occasionally), while keeping on eye on the 5.x / arc-light series.

However, I was wondering if someone could clarify where the community consensus is / seems to be at the moment as to where these two projects stand relative to one another and individually.

Specifically is it correct to state that development on the 2.x series has effectively been discontinued - ie: no future releases / bug fixes planned etc - with all current work directed towards the arc-lite series?

And if so, is arc-lite mature enough that greenfield projects should already be using it? (Ie: Would it be fair to say that there is a consensus that it is safe to use in production, that it has already been vetted at this level?)

My personal situation is that I am using the 2.18.x series in a project that will likely go to production in the next one or two months, but do wonder periodically if I should be investing the effort into switching over to arc-lite now or in the near future (especially if it ever becomes the case that I need to extend dcm4chee via a custom module).

Any thoughts / comments on the above questions would be much appreciated!

Best & thanks,

David

P.S. My apologies if this has been explained elsewhere - I've done a fair amount of digging but have not found anything definitive!

[David Simic]

Any thoughts? Let me retry with a simpler question:

Has the 2.x series indeed been discontinued? If not already, is there a deprecation date?

It is a bit hard to discern the status just from looking at sourceforge - the latest release was at the beginning of 2016 with the last few prior releases happening about once per year. Also, the dcm4che wiki does not seem to have any statements as to 2.x's near-term future and dev activity for 2.x is not easy to gauge due to the absence of activity & contribution statistics such as you would have in a github repo.

Clarifying the status of 2.x would be quite helpful for those of us who are evaluating dcm4chee for enterprise-level deployments, which by their nature often require long term planning. 

(And although it seems to be strongly implied that arc-lite is the future and 2.x is indeed being phased out, knowing concretely that 2.x is say already discontinued, or that it is not yet discontinued but likely to discontinued by say 2019, etc, would be quite helpful.)

Kind regards,

D

[gunterze]

Hi David,

Probable, there will be bug fixes for 2.x, as long the commercial product of my former employing company, which is based on it, is in use.

Personally, I only concentrate on development of dcm4chee-arc-light 5.x which we are using at my new employing company in production since January. On our biggest installation, we received over 1 million studies so far.

gunter

[Hermann Czedik-Eysenberg]

Hi David,

The commercial product of my employer (Gunters previous employer), which is based on 2.x, is beeing phased out and there will be just bug fixes, no new features.

So I can confirm that 5.x is the future.

Hermann

[HM]

Hi 

Herman i was reading on some website that i cannot upgrade to 5.x easily as it  was possible in 2.x and secondly the installation mechanism of 5.x is much more complicated as compared to 2.x. I am not an IT GURU but i myself manage to install and configure 2.x but in case of 5.x i am struck and i cannot do anything without an IT EXPERT???

[David Simic]

Gunter & Herman - thank you very much for your clarifying comments!

Gunter: Neat to hear about the quite significant production deploy. Might be interesting to include a list in the wiki at some point of production deploys specifically for arclight, would be happy to offer my help at some point.

Herman, may I ask if your employer is planning on contributing to 5.x in the future?

Best & thanks,

David

[Hermann Czedik-Eysenberg]

Hi David,

to my knowledge my employer currently has no plans to contribute to the dcm4chee Archive 5.

But we will continue to contribute to the dcm4che 3 Library & Toolkit.

Hermann