Comet 1.0 Release

[John Swinbank]

Dear all,

I have just tagged release 1.0 of Comet, my implementation of a VOEvent broker/publisher/subscriber conforming to the VOEvent Transport Protocol (VTP).

Comet has been in development over several months, and has been tested by various readers of this mailing list (for which they have my thanks!). It provides a complete implementation of VTP 1.1 (and the draft of VTP 1.2) except that it does not provide for cryptographic authentication of either VOEvents or subscribers to event streams. It capable of subscribing to the VTP event streams being produced by both NASA GCN[1] and DC-3 Dreams[2].

Comet is written in pure Python and is based upon the Twisted networking framework. It has been developed and tested on Linux and Mac OSX; I see no reason why it wouldn't run on Windows, but I'm not aware of anybody who has tried it.

Following this release, development continues with a focus on implementing cryptographic authentication schemes following the upcoming note by Bob Denny.

Comet 1.0 is available for download now from <http://comet.transientskp.org/>. Your comments, feedback and suggestions are welcome.

Enjoy,

John

[1] http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/
[2] http://voevent.dc3.com/