[OpenMadrigal-users] Madrigal 2.3 released

[William Rideout]

The latest version of Madrigal, 2.3, has now been released, and is available for 
download at www.openmadrigal.org.  It is now installed and in operation at the 
Millstone, Eiscat, and SRI Madrigal web sites.  Many thanks to Ingemar Häggström 
at Eiscat and Angela Li at SRI for testing the release candidate version.

A complete description of the new features is available at 
http://www.haystack.edu/madrigal/whatsNew.html.

The major new feature is remote programming access to Madrigal via web services 
from any platform. Madrigal now exposes all the information and capabilities it 
has as web services, which allows easy access to Madrigal from any computer on 
the internet using any platform (Unix, Windows, Mac, etc). Madrigal's web 
services are basically cgi scripts with simple output that allows easy parsing 
of the information. Any language that supports the HTTP standard can then access 
any Madrigal site. We have written remote API's using python and Matlab, but 
almost any language could be used. See the tutorial on remote programming access 
to Madrigal at http://www.haystack.mit.edu/madrigal/madContents.html (section 6) 
for details of these APIs and the underlying web services, along with simple 
examples.

Note that this approach of remotely accessing Madrigal data has been always 
possible before by parsing the html output meant to be displayed in a web 
browser (this general programming method is referred to as "screen scraping"). 
However, not only is this parsing difficult; but the code often breaks when the 
user interface is modified in any way. With web services the returned cgi 
scripts are designed to be both simple to parse and stable.

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.

Users who want only to write programs to remotely access Madrigal, and not to 
install a Madrigal server themselves, are now able to download the remote python 
and Matlab API's from the OpenMadrigal site.

Bill

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