SAMP and HTTPS workaround?

[Jean-Michel GLORIAN]

Hi Mark and the SAMP users,

we had talked about this solution in the ASOV french meeting
with all the difficulty that you mention.
Thank you to have implementde a prototype helper application to test that.


If people wants to add SAMP parameters in addition of the file ,
maybe they could add them on the begin of the name of file
using a convention and the helper application could parse the name.
But yes it is quiet limited.

Or maybe we could use a Votable file with a SAMP data model
with all the addition parameters and a link to the data fits file.
The link would be static, dynamic and with or not a limited access  time

JMG

Le 22/08/2019 à 18:10, Mark Taylor a écrit :
> Hi Doug,
>
> thanks for registering an interest.  Any input on the topic welcome.
> I guess the question I'd put related to the approach I'm suggesting
> here is, how easy/hard would you expect it to be to encourage
> WWT/CSC users to download and configure or use a helper application
> along these lines?
>
> My only other comment at this stage is it shouldn't make any difference
> whether the URL points at a fixed file or represents a dynamic query.
>
> Mark
>
> On Thu, 22 Aug 2019, Burke, Douglas wrote:
>
>> Mark,
>>
>> I've been using your WebSAMP JS library [1] with our WWT interface to the
>> Chandra Source Catalog - http://cxc.harvard.edu/csc2/wwt.html - to send
>> URLs that return a votable or fits file when retrieved (ie the URL is
>> actually a query and not to a file [2]). We are moving to https "soon" so I
>> am interested in any possible solution (once the WWT client is moved over
>> to https, that is).
>>
>> Ta,
>> Doug
>>
>> [1] so thanks for that
>> [2] thanks to a confluence of influences that aren't relevant here
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:05 AM 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/


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Jean-Michel Glorian - Responsable technique OV-GSO - Chef de projet CASSIS

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