SAMP Web Profile

[Luigi Paioro]

Dear Mark and all,

   I confirm my intention to include the Web Profile support in SAMPy 
(dual-profile), but my time-scale is not so short. I hope to provide a 
beta release by the end of January.

Best regards,

   Luigi


Il 12/08/10 16:32, Mark Taylor ha scritto:
> Hi all,
>
> for those of you not in Nara: in the Apps session today I made a
> presentation, based on work done by myself and Jonathan Fay, and
> funded by Microsoft Research, proposing a new SAMP profile
> (alternative to the Standard Profile) for use by web-based clients.
> You can find the presentation here:
>
>     http://www.ivoa.net/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/InterOpDec2010Applications
>
> and an associated web page with some additional explanation, demos,
> and a draft of the detailed documentation here:
>
>     http://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/~mbt/websamp/
>
> A show of hands during the session indicated that those of the
> SAMP community present at the meeting were keen to see it taken
> forward, and moved towards becoming an IVOA standard.
> Time was relatively short during the session, so we weren't able
> to pursue much in the way of discussion of open issues.
>
> For those of you who are in Nara, if anyone would like to take the
> opportunity of colocation to discuss any such issues face to face
> I'd be happy to do so.  My guess is that people won't have had
> time to look at the details enough to make a break-out meeting
> worthwhile, but if anybody disagrees get in touch and we could
> maybe do that.  Obviously grab me in coffee breaks etc if you
> want to during this week, otherwise air thoughts on this list.
>
> Issues that occur to me that might benefit from more discussion are:
>
>    - Security issues (already mentioned by Ray and Bob)
>    - Other possibilities for cross-domain workarounds?
>    - Details of the hub external URL proxying mechanism
>    - Hub API details
>    - Choice of port number
>    - Plan for how to take the proposal forward
>
> and no doubt some things I haven't thought of.
>
> Regarding the last point, my ideas about where to go from here are
> roughly these:
>
>   - I will make a public release of JSAMP including implementation of
>     a hub and client conforming to the (intial draft of the) Web Profile.
>     The hub will be potentially dual profile (Web Profile + Standard
>     Profile), but with the Web Profile functionality deactivated by
>     default.  In this way most users of the new release won't see the
>     new (unstable, possibly insecure) functionality, but developers
>     can play with it (e.g. write clients) if they know what they are doing.
>
>   - I will think about tidying up and releasing the JavaScript client
>     library that underpins the Web Profile demos on the web page.
>     This library works, but is not well written, so needs some
>     reworking or rewriting.  I'm not sure yet if I have time to do
>     this in the near future.
>
>   - Others (volunteers anyone?) could provide client-side implementations
>     in various browser-based languages (JavaScript, either based on my
>     JavaScript library or not; Flash; Silverlight; maybe somebody else
>     could try to get an unsigned java applet or unsigned JNLP client
>     working, which I've tried but can't make work for reasons I don't
>     understand).  Thomas has already started!
>     It would be very good if we could have another hub implementation,
>     which most likely means Luigi - he's said that he's willing to
>     implement Web Profile support in SAMPy, but I don't know what
>     timescale is feasible for this.
>     I encourage sharing of successes and failures on the apps-samp
>     mailing list.  Experience using different browser configurations
>     will be useful too.
>
>   - With the implmentation experience gained from these activities,
>     we can revise and improve as appropriate the draft specification
>     that I've drafted.
>
>   - Given that, we work towards the Web Profile becoming defined in a
>     new section of the SAMP document, to form SAMP v1.3.  Alternatively
>     we could consider it as a separate document referenced from SAMP.
>     Again, the timescale for this remains to be seen, but I'd hope
>     we can make some progress in the first half of next year.
>
> 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/