Proposed SAMP Web Profile

[Mark Taylor]

Dear all,

the issue of how to get web pages to talk SAMP has been exercising us 
since before SAMP existed.  The good work of the VO-Paris Data Centre
team in developing WebSampConnector (signed applets) is one answer to 
this.  As those of you who've attended the relevant Apps WG sessions 
at recent Interops may recall, Jonathan Fay (World Wide Telescope) 
has had an interest in alternative approaches.  Following his original
ideas, and supported by funding from Microsoft, I've done some detailed
investigations along these lines.

Basically, this involves defining an alternative SAMP profile which
is suitable for use by sandboxed clients (e.g. JavaScript, Flash,
Silverlight, unsigned applets) running inside a web browser.
If a hub implementing both Web and Standard profiles is running,
this will permit in-browser and desktop clients to communicate with
each other.

I've put together a suggested draft specification for such a Web Profile,
and implemented a dual-profile hub and (very basic) JavaScript client 
to prove that the idea works.  I will be presenting this in one of 
the Apps sessions at the upcoming Interop in Nara, but I wanted to post
a preview here to give interested people a chance to take a look 
and think about it ahead of time if they want to.  Of course it's 
for the SAMP community to decide where this goes from here;
I hope we can have some discussions in Nara about that, but 
contributions on this list are welcome too, especially from people
who may not be attending the Interop.

Between now and Nara (after that it might move or disappear), 
you can take a look at this page:

   http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/websamp/sample.html

which should be reasonably self-explanatory.  The software and text
there are not necessarily of release quality, and it's all subject
to change (including being unavailable if I happen to be mucking 
around with it at the time), but I think it's worth publicising 
progress so far at this stage, to inform the discussion.

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/