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

[Joshua Bloom]

Alasdair,

    You might consider getting a public CVS repository up, rather than 
having to aggregate all of the tweaks that we'll inevitably want to 
perform. This is a great start and you should let some of the community 
help you out at this point.  If you're interested we could add this to 
the pygcnsock project on sourceforge. I could then make anyone a 
developer who requests that status 
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/pygcnsock/)

Josh

On Apr 22, 2005, at 6:54 AM, Alasdair Allan wrote:

> 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
> <Astro-GCN-0.1.tar.gz><Astro-VO-VOEvent-0.1.tar.gz><gcn_server.pl>
*****************************************************
Joshua Bloom
Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley
601 Campbell Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720
(510) 643-3839 http://astro.berkeley.edu/~jbloom
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