The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has recently developed XIP (eXtensible Imaging Platform), a new open-source software platform for the development of medical imaging applications. XIP can be used to rapidly develop imaging applications designed to meet the needs of the optical imaging community. XIP is a state-of-the-art set of visual 'drag and drop' programming tools and associated libraries for the rapid development of imaging and visualization applications. The tools include modules tailored for medical imaging, many of which are hardware accelerated (OpenGL). They also provide a friendlier environment for utilizing popular toolkits such as ITK and VTK, and enable the visualization and processing of any type of optical imaging data and of standard DICOM data. XIP can become a powerful tool to the optical imaging community, as it has built-in functionality for multidimensional data visualization and processing, and enables the development of independently optimized and re-usable software modules, which can be seamlessly added and interconnected to build advanced applications. These applications can range from multimodal imaging integrating structural, molecular and functional information, 2D, 3D, 4D, tomographic, multispectral and/or microscopic imaging, imaging analysis and/or image processing techniques applied to optical imaging (e.g. visualization, segmentation, registration), computational methods and reconstruction techniques, and visual rendering of complex datasets. XIP applications can run "stand alone", including in client/server mode for remote access. XIP also supports the DICOM WG23 "Application Hosting" standard, which will enable plug-in XIP applications to run on any DICOM compliant PACS workstation. Such interoperability will enable the optical imaging community to develop modular applications optimized for their specific imaging needs and widely deploy them across all academic/clinical/industry partners with standard-compliant imaging workstations.