On Sun, 29 Apr 2007, Alasdair Allan wrote:
>> 2) I have code that computes a deblended spectral profile of an eclipsing
>> binary. I would like to plot the spectrum, zoom in on a particular
>> line and overplot my best fit to that feature by sending the data from
>> my fit (without writing an intermediate file).
>>
>> Missing Concept: A data payload with the message instead of a simple
>> file reference.
>
> Actually, I don't think this is a good idea. Having the ability to push data
> inline vastly complicates the protocol because it necessary to support
> arbitrarily large messages. While I can see why you might want to do this in
> the general case, in the specific case of the simple messaging protocol we've
> been tasked to build I think it isn't necessary, perhaps even detrimental, to
> the final goal.
I tend to agree with Alasdair that this isn't a specially good idea, but it is quite possible in PLASTIC; you can send a byte[] array or its XML-RPC equivalent as an argument. The ivo://votech.org/votable/load message has the in-line text of a VOTable as its argument as an illustration of this sort of thing. It's not very frequently used (most applications prefer loadFromURL) for the scalability reasons to which Alasdair alludes.
-- Mark Taylor Astronomical Programmer Physics, Bristol University, UK m.b.taylor@bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/Received on 2007-04-30Z11:51:56