[OpenMadrigal-developers] Update of Madrigal on hyperion with new Matlab API

[William Rideout]

I'm planning to upgrade Hyperion with the newest version of Madrigal 
Wednesday afternoon.  This means that our version of Madrigal will be 
off line for about 1-2 hours. Please let me know if this time is not good.

The new feature that will be installed is the complete Madrigal Matlab 
API.  This new feature is really two new features:

1.  All Madrigal data, from metadata to individual file data, is now 
available as web services.  This means that Madrigal can now be accessed 
by any language (Matlab, IDL, Tcl, etc) that can get data from the web.

2.  A Matlab API has been written to use these web services.  This 
Matlab API can run entirely over the internet, so you can write a Matlab 
program that does everything our present web interface does, except it 
can run on any machine that Matlab will run on (including Windows 
machines).  See the Madrigal documentation page (under API's/Matlab) for 
a full description of each method, or type "help madmatlab" when running 
Matlab on hyperion.

Note that Matlab is not required on the Madrigal web server to support 
these new features.  From the web server's point of view, I simply added 
some cgi scripts written in python.  Matlab is only required to access 
these scripts via the Matlab API (feature 2 above).

The web services are not implemented according to the SOAP or XMLRPC 
standard since not all scripting languages have support for these 
standards (or for XML parsing).  Instead they use the simple approach of 
returning data requested via a query as a delimited text file.  These 
web services are fully documented as part of the Python API.  This would 
allow another scripting language, such as IDL, to access these web 
services.  The Matlab api methods in general simply convert their 
arguments into a query url, and then parse the returned text file into a 
Matlab array of structures.

To test the Matlab API, there is a test program testMadmatlab in 
source/madmatlab.  It simply asks for the main url of the site you wish 
to test, and then calls the various Matlab methods using the standard 
test files.  If that Madrigal site does not yet have this release of 
Madrigal, an error will be returned.

John Holt is planning to write a Matlab application using this Matlab 
API.  When he does, I plan to release that as a Matlab application, so 
that any user with Matlab on a Windows or Unix machine can install and 
run it without needing to install a Madrigal server.

Please let me know if you have any comments.

Bill

-- 
Bill Rideout
MIT Haystack Observatory
Email: brideout at haystack.mit.edu
Phone: 781 981-5624