SAMP browser plugin? Re: SAMP and HTTPS workaround?

[Mark Taylor]

Hi Hugo,

thanks for the input.  I didn't go through all the possibilities
in my talk, but yes a browser plugin of some sort might be able to
solve the problem (and historically I think that some SAMP browser
plugins existed before the Web Profile was introduced as an alternative
solution to that problem, but I don't think they got much beyond
the experimental stage).  A couple of other people mentioned this
at the meeting too.

I have two main reservations about this option.  First, will users
actually install a browser extension?  And second, the amount of
work involved in writing and maintaining the extension code for
multiple versions of multiple browsers.  I don't have much grasp
of how big a drawback either of those things is though.
If anybody wants to experiment with implementation and report back,
that would be great.

Mark


On Mon, 14 Oct 2019, Hugo Buddelmeijer wrote:

> 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/
> >
> 

--
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/