SAMP Perl Hub (Alpha Release)

[Alasdair Allan]

All,

I've just brought my Perl Hub and test clients into line with the  
post-Trieste Working Draft document Mark pushed to the list at the  
tail end of June. Both the Perl Hub and the clients have been tested  
with Mark's Java SAMP kit pre-release and Luigi's SAMPY alpha 1 release.

ftp://andromeda.star.bris.ac.uk/pub/star/samp/samp_export.zip
http://cosmos.iasf-milano.inaf.it/luigi/projects/vo/samp/ 
sampy-1.0alpha.tar.gz

The Perl Hub currently lacks callAndWait( ) functionality, I'll be  
adding that in this week, but should in all other ways meet the 1.0  
WD and be interoperable with the other emerging toolkits.

The code is available from the following URLs,

http://www.babilim.co.uk/software/perl-samp-hub-alpha3.tar.gz
http://www.babilim.co.uk/software/perl-samp-clients-alpha3.tar.gz

and is released under the GPL.

Apart from a quick update towards the end of the week to add  
callAndWait( ), which will be tagged alpha4, this will be the last  
'initial' release. After this I'll take some time to clean up the  
code, add some documentation, and make the client toolkit a bit more  
pleasant to use before making a 'first' release.

However if you want to get your feet dirty ahead of that, you'll need  
the following Perl modules installed: XMLRPC::Lite (part of the  
SOAP::Lite module), XML::Simple, DateTime, File::Spec, Carp,  
Data::Dumper, Getopt::Long, Socket, Net::Domain, POSIX and Errno.  
Depending on your version of Perl some (but not all) of these will  
ship with the core distribution. The rest can be obtained from CPAN  
(http://search.cpan.org/). I think I've caught all the dependancies,  
but if you notice any I haven't listed any let me know I've forgotten  
them.

As with my initial release of the prototype SAMP Hub back at the  
start of May the code comes with no guarantees except there will be  
horrendous bugs. There is no documentation. Many of the Perl modules  
have inline POD, however most of it didn't keep up with the pace of  
development so it's out of date. However, once you install the  
additional modules, open up a terminal window and start the Hub as  
follows,

% tar -zxvf perl-samp-hub-alpha3.tar.gz
% cd perl-samp-hub-alpha3/
% ./samp_hub.pl

you can put the Hub through its paces by opening up two more terminal  
windows and running the testbed clients. You should start the  
listener client in all cases,

% tar -zxvf perl-samp-clients-alpha3.tar.gz
% cd perl-samp-clients-alpha3/
% ./listener_client.pl

this is the test client that listens for notify( ) and call( )'s from  
the Hub.

In the second window you can either start the client that exercises  
the notify( ) method, or the other than exercises the call( ) method. So

% cd perl-samp-clients-alpha3/
% ./callAll_test.pl

or

% cd perl-samp-clients-alpha3/
% ./notifyAll_test.pl

These two clients have a heart beat which will dispatch a call or a  
notification periodically. The first heartbeat will happen 15 seconds  
(or so) after the client has completed its registering with the Hub.

Cheers,
Al.





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