GCN & VOEvent Parser/Writers (inital pre-release)

[Alasdair Allan]

All,

Along with Scott I ended up with an action item from the workshop to 
investigate 3rd generation GCN as a VOEvent aggregator, with the first 
step along this route being a sample GCN -> VOEvent packet convertor.

Find attached two Perl modules.

Firstly we have, Astro::GCN which is a parser for the GCN socket 
packets, then we have Astro::VO::VOEvent, which is a very (very) rough 
outline for a VOEvent writer/parser module. The Astro::VO::VOEvent 
module requires the XML::Parser, XML::Writer and XML::Writer::String 
modules which can be found on CPAN. I think, although I'm not entirely 
certain, that the Astro::GCN module doesn't have any requirements that 
a recent (perl 5.8) installation of Perl won't already have...

Also attached is a quick Perl script which uses these modules to sit 
and watch a GCN socket connection (in a similar manner to Scott's 
socket_demo.c program) and intercepts all SWIFT packets. It'll turn 
"interesting ones" such as SWIFT_BAT_GRB_POS_ACK into VOEvent messages.

That won't be too interesting to people unless they already have 
infrastructure in place (as I do) to fake GCN message packets as 
bona-fide BAT_POS messages don't happen every few minutes.

I want to emphasise that these are pre-release sub-alpha quality and 
haven't been extensively tested and are presented as example code only. 
I'm following a "release early, release often" maxim here rather than 
waiting till I have something which is robust, or production ready.

So, as always, your milage may vary!

Cheers,
Al.
-- 
Dr. A. Allan, School of Physics, University of Exeter
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Astro-GCN-0.1.tar.gz
Type: application/x-gzip
Size: 13623 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.ivoa.net/pipermail/voevent/attachments/20050422/1b2cae3d/attachment-0002.gz>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Astro-VO-VOEvent-0.1.tar.gz
Type: application/x-gzip
Size: 12703 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.ivoa.net/pipermail/voevent/attachments/20050422/1b2cae3d/attachment-0003.gz>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: gcn_server.pl
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 8468 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.ivoa.net/pipermail/voevent/attachments/20050422/1b2cae3d/attachment-0001.obj>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PGP.sig
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 186 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://www.ivoa.net/pipermail/voevent/attachments/20050422/1b2cae3d/attachment-0001.bin>