Administrative MTypes

[Mark Taylor]

Hi,

I'm putting together a revised draft of the SAMP document for WD as
discussed in Trieste.  As we agreed, the SAMP document should contain
descriptions of administrative MTypes, while application-specific
ones should be described elsehere (probably in an IVOA Note).

The suggested list Mike posted in his presentation was:

    hub.event.stopping
    app.event.register
    app.event.unregister
    app.event.mtype
    app.event.metadata
    app.event.starting
    app.event.stopping
    app.echo
    app.isAlive

Note that app.event.{starting,stopping} are not intended to indicate
whether a client has joined/left SAMP, but whether it has started or
stopped "processing" in some application-specific sense - Al argued
in the session that these names should be changed to avoid confusion.

I'd like to suggest that app.event.{register,unregister,mtype,metadata}
are renamed hub.event.{register,unregister,mtype,metadata}.
Although it's true they describe things about applications,
they can also be seen as describing changes to the hub state.
Furthermore, like hub.event.stopping, they should always be sent by
the hub itself rather than by individual clients, so it seems to me
like a good idea to group all these hub.event.* messages together,
and separately from things like app.echo or (the possibly renamed)
app.event.starting, which would be sent by applications.

Does anyone wish to agree/disagree/comment?

Mark

-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/