The authors describe a new class which uses the CURL library to read the images through a network protocol.

The source code is provided as well as the input images.

I've been able to download, build and run the code with the test program. However I would suggest checking the output image in the test, to be sure that the class is fully working. This can be easily achieved by adding a writer to the test program and by adding the following lines:

FIND_PROGRAM(ITK_TEST_DRIVER itkTestDriver)
SET(TEST_COMMAND ${ITK_TEST_DRIVER} --add-before-env PATH ${CMAKE_BINARY_DIR})

ADD_TEST( ImageNetworkReaderTest ${TEST_COMMAND}
          ImageNetworkReaderTest http://www.na-mic.org/Wiki/images/f/f6/Test.nhdr out.nhdr
          --compare out.nhdr ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/images/Test.nhdr
)

ITK and curl, both fully open source.

The code is usable without problem and clearly described.

The code is nice.

This new class would be useful when working on several hosts (computer cluster, ...).

The use of the current directory may be problematic in many cases. I would rather suggest using the one given by the environment variables $TMP or $TMPDIR, or in /tmp if it exist, or finally in the current directory if none of the other option are possible.

The reader doesn't seem to delete the downloaded file once no more used. I think it should, but it seems to be a quite different behavior of the cache feature proposed by Julien.

Do you think about creating a similar class to write the images through the network? Is that possible with curl?

A great contribution!

This paper presents a new class for loading ITK images over the network using the cURL

The author provides the source code with tests. Anyone familiar with CMake should be able to compile and run the code.

The code compiles fine under MSVC 2008 express. CMake 2.6 reports some policies errors.

This paper proposes a contribution to ITK.

The code is usable in his form and is failry easy to compile.

The code follows the ITK coding style

1) The paper mention support for SSL protocols (FTPS/HTTPS/LDAPS). However the cURL library distributed with the source code doesn't include the crypto library, thus these protocols will not work. At least there should be an option in CMake to point to the crypto library (this would require some header modification in the cURL library). It's difficult to include the crypto/openssl library because it's not easy to Cmake-ified it. (and maybe source redistribution limitations).

2) It seems that the current source code doesn't use the cache. If an image has already been downloaded, the code should look if the image in the cache is not older than the one on the server, if it is not it should not try to download again. I have not looked deeply in the code but I don't think this is supported (otherwise just ignore this comment).

Overall a great contribution that will be really usefull, especially for regression testing.