SAMP v1.3 Proposed Recommendation: Request For Comments

This page contains public discussion of the SAMP v1.3 Proposed Recommendation PR-SAMP-1.3-20111128. The RFC was announced on 12 December 2011 and will run until 29 January 2012 (period extended in consideration of the Christmas break).

RFC Review Period: 12 December 2011 - 29 January 2012

Change Summary

The main change between the previous version REC-SAMP-1.2-20101216 and this version is the addition of a new section (Section 5) defining the new SAMP Web Profile. A small number of other changes and clarifications have been made elsewhere in the document as listed in Appendix B.

This document has been developed within the public subversion repository Volute, in directory projects/samp/doc. The exact changes between the 1.2 REC and 1.3 PR LaTeX source files can be seen on this diff page.

Implementations and Validators

There are two interoperating implementations of the entire SAMP standard, including the new Web Profile:

SAMPy (Python)

Version 1.2.1

includes a Web Profile hub implementation. This currently has one small incompatibility in the registration call (left over from a previous version of the standard) which will be fixed in the next release.

JSAMP (Java)

Version 1.3-1

includes a Web Profile hub implementation and (mainly for testing) a Web Profile client.

A Web Profile client implementation library in JavaScript (which, unlike Python and desktop Java, is one of the languages it makes sense to write Web Profile clients in) is available at http://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/~mbt/websamp/, along with a few examples of web pages that use it.

These all work with no known problems, except that the Web Profile doesn't work from all browsers (Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari all OK, Opera not working, others not tried).

JSAMP contains a hub validation suite which tests pretty much all of SAMP and runs without error against both SAMPy and JSAMP hubs. There is not however a comprehensive validation suite that runs from a web page, which might be a good idea for testing the Web Profile.

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