SAMP in SkyView

[Mark Taylor]

On Wed, 5 Nov 2008, Tom McGlynn wrote:

> 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?

Hi Tom,

I think that is a nice idea, I hadn't thought of it before,
and I may follow Luigi's lead and add something along these lines
to JSAMP.  However, while this kind of scripting approach does 
give you a lot of flexibility and will appeal to some, I think
there will be quite a few astronomers who would find that sort
of thing a bit too command-line for their tastes or abilities, 
or would just not think of tackling the problem that way. 
A GUI application which listens for coord.pointAt.sky messages 
(perhaps a new optional "radius" argument to coord.pointAt.sky 
would be appropriate here) and has a set of menus something like the 
SkyView HTML query page (maybe command-line flags as alternatives) 
would also be a neat thing to have.  Whether you think it's within 
SkyView's remit is another matter - it could be built as a separate
application which just uses SkyView classes.

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/