[ome-devel] Launching VisBio from the OME web interface

[Curtis Rueden]

Ilya Goldberg wrote:

> The perlish way to do this is supposed to be
> use Sys::Hostname;
>         $server = hostname();
> It reports a fully qualified hostname everywhere I tried it so far.   
> See if that works better.
> I committed it to HEAD.
>
> We probably should put this in the configuration table during  
> installation and always get it from there.  There are a few places  
> where a FQDN needs to be generated and sent to a remote client.   
> Register a bug maybe?


I tried it, and the situation improved from "" to "skyking", but still 
no fully qualified name. I agree that a configuration table entry makes 
sense.

> Do you really need to launch the whole application instance?  Can you  
> launch a little bitty application that just checks if there are any  
> instances running, then passes the arguments to any running ones, or  
> loads up the whole application if there's not?  I don't know what I'm  
> talking about, so I'll butt out now.


There are several really messy solutions, such as a tiny app launched 
via JWS that checks whether VisBio is running, then downloads and runs 
it if not, but that's not a nice can of worms, and it basically 
reinvents what Web Start already does quite well.

Actually, enabling VisBio to detect other instances was not as bad as I 
thought. I used a simple socket server like I mentioned, and it works 
well. The VisBio JWS code has been updated, so give it a shot if you are 
interested. Now if there is already an instance of VisBio running, 
clicking the "View Image in VisBio" link pops up the OME login window in 
the existing instance rather than fully spawning a new one.

I'll get to the support for session keys next week.

-Curtis