SAMP browser plugin? Re: SAMP and HTTPS workaround?

[Hugo Buddelmeijer]

Hi all,

Would a SAMP browser plugin be a solution to the https problem?

That is, users install a samp-plugin, the websites connect to the plugin,
and the plugin connects to the samp-hub. This seems possible:
https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/nativeMessaging
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Native_messaging

Maybe it would be feasible to have this browser plugin to be effectively
another SAMP hub (that talks to the desktop hub); that is, adding a new
browser-plugin profile to standard. That way anyone could make a compliant
plugin so we would not be at the merci of this hypothetical plugin author.

There are only a few browsers (chrome, firefox, safari), so it might be
less work than the relay-solution.

My experience with browser plugins is very limited (a single experiment
years ago), so maybe it is not as simple. And maybe installing
yet-another-browser-plugin for just a single use case is too much overhead
for some people.

Any thoughts?

Hugo



On Thu, 22 Aug 2019 at 15:05, Mark Taylor <M.B.Taylor at bristol.ac.uk> wrote:

> Dear SAMP users,
>
> the problem of Web SAMP and HTTPS has been under discussion
> for a while now - basically the Web Profile works fine with HTTP
> but won't work from pages served using HTTPS.  A possible HTTPS-capable
> profile has been prototyped, but it's pretty nasty.  There is much
> more information on the topic here:
>
>    http://andromeda.star.bristol.ac.uk/websamp/
>
> As an alternative to the HTTPS profile, I'm thinking about more
> lightweight workarounds.  One is just to provide a simple helper
> application that takes a suitable filename on the command line
> (VOTable table or FITS image) and sends it to a running SAMP
> client.  Such an application could be associated in the
> browser with suitable MIME types (application/x-votable+xml,
> image/fits), or you could just choose it when the browser
> asks you what application you want to open a downloaded file with.
>
> This is much less flexible than allowing the web page (web application)
> to interact with the SAMP hub itself, which is what you can do
> with SAMP+Web Profile.  However, in practice, nearly(?) all Web SAMP
> pages that I'm aware of just use Web SAMP to allow the user to
> send a samp.load.votable or image.load.fits message, and that's
> done nearly as well by the helper application.  It works with
> rather than against normal browser operations, which makes it
> much less painful to implement than the HTTPS profile;
> it works equally with HTTPS or HTTP, and no additional
> infrastructure is required.  The main downside is that the user has
> to configure it somehow (install script, tell browser to use it
> to handle relevant files).
>
> I have written such a helper application, and I'd be interested
> to know if anyone wants to try it out: especially data providers
> who are using HTTPS and want to allow users to load tables/images
> using SAMP.  Would this be an acceptable solution?
>
> You can find the application here:
>
>    http://andromeda.star.bris.ac.uk/websamp/sampload.jar
>
> If you run, e.g. "java -jar sampload.jar /tmp/tmpfile.vot"
> then it will pop up a window asking which VOTable-capable
> SAMP client you want to send tmpfile.vot to.
> (It works out what kind of file it is by looking at the content).
>
> Unless your OS/browser can execute jar files directly, to use it with
> a browser you'll need to accompany it with a small shell script or
> equivalent like
>
>    #!/bin/sh
>    java -jar /path/to/sampload.jar "$@"
>
> Any feedback, comments, ideas welcome.
>
> Mark
>
> --
> Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
> m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/
>
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