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The original version of the toolkit was designed with the intention of submmitting it to Sun as a standard Java-based DICOM API. With that in mind, the toolkit was separated into an interface layer and an implementation layer. The JSR never happened, but the project started gaining in popularity among the Java DICOM development crowd. Shortly after, the dcm4jboss archive was born. This sub-project implemented the IHE Image Manager and Image Archive actors. dcm4jboss has evolved into a robust, stable platform for managing imaging studies and reports. It has participated (and succeeded) in the IHE Connectathon several times and is deployed in production at many sites. Recently, the archive was renamed to something a little more descriptive of its nature. It is now called dcm4chee - the extra "e" signifying its enterprise usage.
In the recent past Gunter felt the need to re-architect the DICOM toolkit. Performance, memory usage, flexibility, and simplicity (removing the JSR-motivated interface layer) were all driving factors in this decision. This new version of the toolkit has been labeled dcm4che2 (or dcm4che-2.x). With this version of the toolkit, Gunter has truly raised the bar for Java DICOM toolkits.
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