[AstroPy] Sampy and ds9

[Mark Taylor]

On Sun, 23 Aug 2009, Rick Wagner wrote:

> Hi Wolfgang,
> 
> > I have just installed Sampy and was excited about letting it talk to
> > ds9. Unfortunatley I tried to run a SAMPY hub and when I tried to
> > connect with DS9 it gave an internal error. I then ran ds9 and Aladin,
> > so I guess one of them supplies the hub. I tried to connect to the hub
> > but ds9 doesnt see the client. Has anyone gotten sampy talking to ds9?
> > I hope this is the right mailinglist for this
> > cheers
> >      Wolfgang
> 
> I'm a little familiar with SAMP-enabled applications, and I'll try to help if
> I can. To begin, I believe Aladin does provide both a client and hub
> interface. If you want to test ds9 and Aladin as clients talking to a separate
> hub, you should try running a standalone hub such as JSAMP [1], or Perl SAMP
> [2]. Depending on how this works out, you'll know whether to contact the SAMPy
> developers (Luigi Paioro), or the ds9 developers (Bill Joye). For reference,
> you can find links to several SAMP-enabled applications on the IVOA wiki [3],
> including the what version of the application supports SAMP.
> 
> (I don't know how many others on the AstroPy mailing list are using SAMP hubs
> and applications, so I'm cross-posting this to the SAMP standard mailing list.
> It's not really the place for user support, but hopefully you'll hear from one
> of the ds9 or SAMP developers.)

Wolfgang, 

sorry this isn't working smoothly.  I believe that the ds9 and SAMPy 
people are talking to each other, so it ought to be OK;
but having said that, if I try using the latest 5.7 beta version 
of ds9 and the public 1.11.0 release of SAMPy, it doesn't work 
for me (ds9 reports "Malformed URL" and fails to connect).

I can hack it so that it works: after starting the SAMPy hub,
hand-edit the ~/.samp file and add a trailing "/" to the line
that starts "samp.hub.xmlrcp.url=", before starting ds9.
This obviously isn't ideal; it shouldn't be necessary, and I
think it's a ds9 bug which hopefully the author will address soon.

As Rick says, in the mean time you could use a different hub,
e.g. the JSAMP one.  You would still be able to use the SAMPy
clients in this case, i.e. use python scripting to control ds9
or other applications.  Feel free to ask on this list (or to me
direct) if you have any further questions.

Mark

PS:  Rick, thanks for bouncing this to apps-samp - I think it's OK
     to use it for user support issues which are, or look like they
     may be, related to SAMP infrastructure issues.

--
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/