SAMP in SkyView

[Tom McGlynn]

The demonstrations of SAMP in scripting environments at the IVOA were 
pretty impressive. I was motivated to put in a SAMP capability into the 
standalone version of SkyView.  It was pretty easy to add in using 
Mark's JSAMP package.  All that it does is generate
image.load.fits messages whenever SkyView generates an image.  E.g.,
if there's a SAMP hub and the SAMPified version of Aladin running
one can just enter

     skyview survey=2massh,2massk,2massj position=abell1656 samp=true

and the three 2MASS images will pop into Aladin. SkyView is primarily an 
image generation tool, so that seems like the natural way to use SAMP 
internally.

I'd also thought about adding a listener capability into SkyView, so 
that, e.g., one would click on an image in some other application and 
have SkyView generate images.  On reflection I've decided that's 
probably not the right way to go.  It seems to me that it would be 
better to have build a more generic listener that invokes a command as 
needed.  E.g.,

   messageListener -mtype coord.pointAt.sky \
     -action 'skyview position=$ra,$dec survey=dss size=0.05 pixels=100'

where the idea is that the the $ra and $dec are parameters of the mtype. 
  Every time the listener gets a message it spawns off a new process. 
Seems like this is just a more sophisticated version of Mark's snooper 
and a natural complement to messageSender.  With messageSender and 
messageListener, I could SAMPify lot's of tools using simple scripts.

Has anyone already implemented such a thing?  Does that seem like the 
right approach?

	Regards,
	Tom McGlynn