do something useful and simple first

[Ray Plante]

Hi Roy,

On Fri, 6 Feb 2009, Roy Williams wrote:
> and doesn't give our customers anything that they will value.

I think this mischaracterizes the TAP effort.  We have seen from our own 
summer schools that OpenSkyQuery is clearly near or at the top of the list 
of things people find most valueable.  TAP is intended to be a better 
OpenSkyNode.

It is also intended to be a better cone search, able to do multi-cones. 
More to the point, TAP is meant to be a general foundation that many 
capabilities can be built upon.  This is understandably harder to do than 
a simple cone search or a simple multi-cone search.

Now, it's understandable that you might not want to wait around for TAP to 
settle to get a multi-cone capability.  And you can argue that it's more 
productive to start simple, which is why we have cone search.  But we've 
also demonstrated that, unless you are really lucky or really smart, it's 
hard to go from simple to general without a major rewrite.

I might suggest that if you would like to see a simple multi-cone, perhaps 
building on the current cone search, that you draw up a proposal.

cheers,
Ray