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Motivation
Motivation
In general, scientific analysis applications want a higher level interface and want to be isolated from the details of, and changes to, the more fundamental VO protocols and related technology comprising the core VO infrastructure. Astro Runtime hides most of the details of the VO infrastructure, provides a straightfoward way to deal with protocol versioning, and allows for more transparent infrastructure evolution.
Some current or potential uses of the AR are
- as infrastructure for new VO clients and services.
- to VO-integrate existing desktop applications
- to provide VO functionality to existing packages (PyRaf, Parceltongue/AIPS)
- simplify science scripting: e.g. programmatic access to VO services from Python, Perl, IDL
- to provide a commandline interface to the VO
Virtual Observatory technology is becoming complex - partly through necessity, and partly because of growing pains. This complexity is challenging and time-consuming to learn and may be a barrier to entry for some. Amongst the causes of the complexity are:
- growing number of standards
- interaction between standards
- variation between standard versions
- non-compliance of service implementations
- use of existing computer-science technologies - WS-*, SOAP, XML Schema
- variation between implementations of these technologies
We hope that the Astro Runtime (AR) hides enough of this complexity so that the VO becomes accessible to more developers - from professional programmers to casual shell scripters.