In the transition of NIH Image to Java, Rasband wanted to retain the elements of NIH Image that had made it so successful but felt the software deserved a new name and chose ImageJ to maintain the connection to NIH Image but with a “J” to indicate its Java foundation. The transition from NIH Image to ImageJ was not without its problems, however, as the cross-platform compatibility proved difficult at times. The first public implementation of Java had many rough edges. Instead of ‘write once, run everywhere’, Rasband found himself writing once and debugging everywhere. As one of the first end user scientific programs to widely use Java, there were many difficulties in getting ImageJ to work properly on different platforms and Java environment distributions. As an early Java adopter Rasband had to tackle many software interface issues from talking to native hardware code for data acquisition to dealing with varying levels of Java support on different operating systems. But over time, as the Java runtime environments improved and coding problems were solved, porting NIH Image to Java set the stage for ImageJ to achieve even greater success.
