[Plastic-devs] Re: Displaying VOEvents in Aladin through Plastic

[John Taylor]

Alasdair Allan wrote:
>
> Just as a heads up for those of to whom this is new, the following 
> comes out of a discussion John Taylor and I had at the VOTech DSRP 
> meeting in Sorrento last week. For those of you on the VOEvent list, 
> information about Plastic can be found at http://plastic.sourceforge.net/
The docs on the site are a little light.  I'm busy updating them for 
people outside the current dev group, but in the meantime the following 
summary might be of interest:

What:
Plastic is a spec for a messaging system drawing on the experiences of 
the Aladin and VisIVO teams and based on technology used by Noel 
Winstanley for the Astro Client Runtime.  The system is designed to be 
very simple, to encourage app developers to use it, and platform neutral.

Why:
To allow visualisation and other tools to interoperate, to allow users 
to compose applications on the desktop and developers to create 
applications that "do one thing and do it well", to allow data 
exploration through "linked views" (but linked across application 
boundaries), to enable collaborative data exploration, and no doubt lots 
of reasons we haven't thought of yet.  The sorts of things we can do at 
the moment are: one application can cause another application to load a 
VOTable and selecting data points in one application highlights them in 
the other.  Simple things, but powerful nonetheless.

How:
Using a publish - subscribe architecture with a central "hub" 
multiplexing messages between clients.  The hub supports different 
protocols: java rmi, xml-rpc and plain http, in the hope that just about 
any client should be able to speak one of them.

For a very brief introduction to how things work you could take a look 
at my slides from the Sorrento VOTech meeting:
http://wiki.eurovotech.org/pub/VOTech/AnomalyDetection/plasticSorrentoNoAn.pdf 



Regards,
John Taylor
VOTech