Difference: ApplicationsMessagingUseCases (6 vs. 7)

Revision 72007-04-23 - MarkTaylor

 
META TOPICPARENT name="ApplicationsMessaging"

Applications Messaging Uses

Below are some informal descriptions of the sorts of uses envisaged for application messaging.

PLASTIC

These are some of the current uses of PLASTIC:

Instruct an app to:

  • load a VOTable
  • load a FITS image
  • load a spectrum
  • select/highlight a subset of points in a scatter plot
  • create a new table from a row subset
  • highlight an object in one view as the mouse hovers over the same object in another view (in a different application)
  • work on a selection of a columns in a table (for instance, run a kmeans clusterer on only some columns/attributes)
  • load a (registry) VOResource description and do "something appropriate"
  • show a particular area of sky
  • display a group of clusters (in the datamining sense) in different colours (not yet implemented)
  • ask another application to display a DSS preview image of a given region of the sky
  • display the location of a VOEvent

Desktop-2-Desktop PLASTIC

I'm currently using desktop-2desktop PLASTIC to pass messages from a remote server machine running a daemon, which may have interesting things to tell/show a user, passing message through a PLASTIC Gateway (cf the Garching VOTech meeting hack-a-thon), to a "local" desktop where if the user is running their gateway (and appropriate display/visualisation applications) the data is then displayed for them to look at, if no gateway is running at their end the messages from the daemon are simply ignored. In other words the user can keep up with what their backend software is doing if they want to, or ignore it and let it get on with things if they're confident it's doing the right thing.

- AlasdairAllan - 06 Apr 2007

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User-controlled Data Exchange

 
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One of the core uses of PLASTIC messaging at the moment is exchange of high-level data objects (tables, images, spectra) between applications as directed by a human user as part of his/her interaction with said applications. The messages used for this are covered by the "current uses" section above, but for the sake of definiteness here is the kind of sequence in which this messaging typically takes place:
  1. An application X identifies the URL of a VOTable from somewhere (e.g. cone search). It knows that it is a VOTable. It wishes to provide the facility for passing this to some other software component, which may be able to do something interesting with VOTables.
  2. X finds out from the hub which other currently-running applications can do something useful with a VOTable, and provides a list of these to the user (e.g. a popup menu). Some of the applications which declare their ability to deal with this kind of data may provide additional human-readable information about what they will do with them, and/or provide multiple options in this regard. So for instance A's "do something with this VOTable" menu might look like:
    • Aladin: load
    • TOPCAT: load
    • Y: crossmatch
    • Y: convertToFITS
  3. The user may select one (or occasionally more) of these options and initiate sending the message thus specified. X may or may not receive some acknowledgement from the receiving application(s) that the transfer has succeeded, and may or may not decide to act on any such acknowledgement.
 
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-- MarkTaylor - 23 Apr 2007
 


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