US (NVO/VAO) opinions on HTTP GET in VOSpace 2.0

[Douglas Tody]

Hi Dave -

In few cases currently in actual archives do we use a mere webserver
to deliver data to users.  With the DAL services currently often it
is the service itself which delivers the data (services the HTTP GET).
Very commonly a server is dedicated to these services and there is no
conventional Web server.  In any case, we need VOSpace for per-user
storage management for asynchronous services, for table integration
with TAP (where the file is also a DBMS table), and so forth.

Cheers,

 	- Doug


On Thu, 1 Oct 2009, Dave Morris wrote:

>
>
> On 29/09/09 21:52, Doug Tody wrote:
>> 
>> Well this is an awful lot of trouble to go to just to get a file
>> from a storage service using a standard protocol.
>
> Yes, it is isn't it.
> If standard HTTP GET works for your data, then please use a webserver.
>
>> In effect what I am suggesting is that we integrate this resolver service 
>> directly
>> into each vospace implementation.
>
> Why ?
> If standard HTTP GET works for your data, then please use a webserver.
> VOSpace is intended to handle the cases where HTTP GET isn't suitable.
>
>> A use case
>> where this would not work is if we have a vospace integrated into a
>> desktop analysis framework and our desktop (e.g. laptop) is operating
>> without an Internet connection.
>
> I'm not sure how embedding a VOSpace service into a desktop application would 
> work.
> Particularly if it didn't have an active Internet connection.
> Could you provide more detail for this ?
>
> On the other hand, what we are working on in AstroGrid is implementing a 
> VOSpace resolver in the VODesktop client. This will resolve resolve vos://... 
> URIs and provide a localhost http://... URL that can be passed via SAMP to 
> other desktop applications on the same machine. The AstroGrid VODesktop 
> client would handle all of the authentication and protocol negotiation and 
> act as a proxy for the other desktop applications. This enables us to access 
> secure resources in VOSpace using the single sign on provided by our 
> VODesktop client and pass the data to other SAMP enabled applications running 
> on the same machine.
>
>> this might mean making HTTP a special case with optimized support.
>> I don't like special cases either but this is a pretty important one
>
> If standard HTTP GET works for your data, then please use a webserver.
> VOSpace is intended to handle the cases where HTTP GET isn't suitable.
>
> So far you have not convinced me that this special case is special enough to 
> justify adding it to the VOSpace specification.
>
> Regards,
> Dave
>