Web deployment question

[Benjamin Gilbert]

On 10/18/2012 10:34 AM, Bob Seifert wrote:
> I'm a resident pathologist at the University of South Florida and I'm
> looking to set up a small OpenSlide and OpenSeaDragon webserver to
> handle weekly cases for review.
>
> All we have available to act as a host is a Windows 7 desktop.  In
> fact we are still struggling to get IT to let us use it as a server,
> but that is a different problem.
>
> I wanted to know how to deploy OpenSlide and OpenSeaDragon on this
> desktop and I'm struggling to find documentation on the subject
> online.  Where do the whole slide image files go?  Simple questions, I
> realize but this isn't my area of expertise.

Hi Bob,

There are two pieces to this.  OpenSlide knows how to read slide files. 
  OpenSlide Python (the interface to OpenSlide from the Python language) 
has some additional code to produce the Deep Zoom tiles needed by 
OpenSeadragon.  You will need both.

Martin Weihrauch recently installed OpenSlide and OpenSlide Python on 
Windows and wrote up a wiki page on how he did it:

 
https://github.com/openslide/openslide/wiki/RunningDeepZoomTilerOnWindows

That document should be a good starting point.  Note that Martin used 
deepzoom_tile.py, which writes Deep Zoom tiles for the *entire* slide. 
In your case, this is a waste of time and storage space -- I assume each 
slide will be viewed only briefly.  Instead, you should look at 
deepzoom_server.py, which generates individual tiles when they are 
requested by a web browser.

deepzoom_server.py also requires Flask, which in turn requires some 
other things.  The best way to get them is to install setuptools:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools

and use that to install Flask.

Yes, there are a lot of pieces.  Our software distributions are 
currently tailored more for programmers than for end users.  If you run 
into problems setting everything up, let us know.

Finally, when you run deepzoom_server.py, it will serve you *one* slide. 
  To change the slide, you have to stop and restart the program.  It's 
intended as an example demonstrating how to integrate OpenSlide into a 
website; it's not really intended as a standalone system.

> I was planning on building an interface using an IDE called "Tersus"
> which is a visual programming language that I have some familiarity
> with (tersus.com). But I can use XAMPP for windows to host OpenSlide
> and OpenSeaDragon if need be.

XAMPP doesn't seem to include Python, so it won't help you here.


By the way, what format are your slide files?

--Benjamin Gilbert