SAMP_HUB Standard Profile extension - towards SAMP v1.2

[Mark Taylor]

Dear SAMPers,

following the suggestion by Luigi in April:

   http://www.ivoa.net/forum/apps-samp/1004/date.htm

and the agreement to go ahead with it at the Interop in May:

   http://www.ivoa.net/internal/IVOA/InterOpMay2010Applications/samp.pdf (p4)

(though note the details in my presentation are slightly inaccurate)
Luigi and I have implemented the scheme to allow customisation of
hub location using an environment variable.

This is an extension to the Standard Profile, which means that if the
environment variable SAMP_HUB exists, its content will tell compliant
clients and hubs where to look for the lockfile.  If the environment
variable doesn't exist, behaviour is as before, which is to look in
the file ".samp" in the user's home directory.

The details are in the current version of the samp.tex document at its
home in the Volute repository: see file projects/samp/doc/samp.tex
at http://code.google.com/p/volute/.  You can use the web interface or
subversion to see how this differs from the v1.11 REC
(compare svn/trunk to svn/tags/sampdoc-rec1.11-2009-04-21).

The SAMPy and JSAMP implementations appear to work and to interoperate
without problems.  If anyone has comments, or suggested changes, or
wants to try out the new functionality, please do.

Unless some reason to change/delay becomes clear, I'll see about
promoting a version of the SAMP document with these changes
through the documents standardisation process.  I anticipate this
being SAMP v1.2.

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/