Connecting a tablet to a SAMP environment on the desktop

[Hugo Buddelmeijer]

Dear SAMP users,

Tablets with a touch screen could be a valuable addition in the 
interactive exploration of our data. Therefore, it would be nice to be 
able to connect a tablet (iPad, android) to an existing SAMP setup. That 
is, to have the SAMP HUB and most applications running on the desktop, 
and run only a simple interactive visualization tool on the tablet.

However, this seems not to be possible with either the default profile 
or the proposed web profile. What are your ideas on this?

- The default profile requires the tablet application to setup an 
XML-RPC server. In practice this would often be impossible, for example 
due to inbound-blocking firewalls or restrictions in the device itself.

- The web profile could remove these restrictions. Running a SAMP 
application on a tablet would then simply become loading a web page. 
However, this does not work either because the spec recommends to block 
connections from another device (sec. 5.2.3 and 5.4.2.1).

My ideas to remedy this would be one of the following:
- (Optionally) allow external connections in the SAMP web profile?
- Add the long-polling option also to the default SAMP profile?
- A third profile?

At the moment I'm not in the position to work on such a tablet 
application myself, although I would like to do so in the future. 
However, I thought the web profile standardization would be a good 
opportunity to discuss this scenario.

Greetings,
Hugo Buddelmeijer