Content-type: text/html Manpage of VOCLIENT

VOCLIENT

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: May 2013
Index Return to Main Contents

NAME

VOClient - Virtual Observatory (VO) Libraries and Desktop Applications

SYNOPSIS

VOClient is a collection of programming APIs and command-line tools that provide a user-ready VO software distribution for both scientists and developers. The initial release of the package is intended primarily to distribute the completed CLI tools, additional tasks are planned as new functionality is added to the libraries and as new standards come on-line in the VO.

The VOClient package includes a number of command-line utilities built from the underlying interfaces. These tasks can be scripted from any number of environments or used in a standalone manner. Tasks distributed in this release include:

Command-Line Tools

Data Access Tools

voatlas: Query the SkyView Image service for an all-sky image
vocatalog: Query VO catalog services for data
vodata: Query and access VO data services
voimage: Query VO image services for data
voiminfo: Print/Get information about a FITS file's structure
vospectra: Query VO spectral services for data

Utility Tools

voregistry: VO Registry search client
vosesame: Call the Sesame name resolver service
vosamp: Command-line SAMP tool

VOTable Tools

votcnv: Convert from VOTable to another format
votget: Download URLs or access references in a VOTable
votinfo: Get information about a VOTable
votopic: Query data resources specified by topic keyword
votpos: Extract the main positional columns from a VOTable
votsort: Extract the main positional columns from a VOTable
votstat: Compute statistics for numeric columns of a VOTable.

Programming Interfaces

libsamp: SAMP interface. This interface allows an application to send and receive SAMP messages but does NOT (at this time) provide a local Hub implementation. Applications can register their own functions to be used as callbacks in response to a message, the API provides only the middle-ware needed to handle the SAMP protocol.
libvoclient: Client-side VO interface. This interface uses the VOClient Daemon to access a variety of VO web services (Registry, Sesame, DAL services, etc) which then communicate to the API to pass information back to the application.
libvotable: VOTable parser interface. The interface provides both read (lax parsing) and write (strict compliance) capabilities. Reference is VOTable v1.2.
libvoapps: VO Applications interface. High-level interface to application functionality. Tasks are built on these routines to provide the cmdline user interface, but are encapsulated in an API to provide this functionality to other environments easily (as opposed to having that functionality be re-implemented using the low-level interfaces).

Dependency Libraries

libcurl: SAMP interface
libcfitsio: C FITSIO interface
libexpat: XML parser
libxmlrpc-c: XML-RPC interface

INSTALLATION

Using Pre-Built Binaries

Pre-built binary distributions are available containg both source and binaries for a specific platform. These distribution names are of the form



        voclient-<version>-bin.<arch>.tar.gz

where <arch> is one of

linux: 32-bit Linux systems (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, etc).
linux64: 64-bit Linux systems (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, etc).
macosx: 32-bit OSX 10.6 and higher systems for Mac.
macintel: 64-bit OSX 10.6 and higher systems for Mac.

The distribution file may be unpacked with the command



tar zxf /<path>/voclient-<version>-bin.<arch>.tar.gz

This will produce a 'voclient' subdirectory containing the unpacked distribution. Within that directory you'll find the following important directories needed to install the package on the system:

bin/: Task binaries
lib/: API library files
include/: Program header files

The contents of these directories should be copied to some system directory available in the normal user paths. For example, to install in /usr/local



% cd /<path>/voclient
% sudo cp bin/* /usr/local/bin
% sudo cp lib/* /usr/local/lib
% sudo cp include/* /usr/local/include

When compiling new applications the appropriate '-I' and '-L' flags will need to be set to find the libraries and include files needed. The binary installation directory should be some directory in the normal $PATH environment setting.

Building VOClient from Source

The source distribution of the release is containe in the file



voclient-src.tar.gz

It may be unpacked with the command



tar zxf /<path>/voclient-src.tar.gz

This will produce a 'voclient' subdirectory containing the unpacked distribution. Utility scripts are used throughout the system to do the platform configuration necessary, therefore the only command needed to build the package is:


% cd /<path>/voclient
% make

As with the pre-built binary described above, the following important directories are needed to install the package on the system:



bin/            Task binaries
lib/            API library files
include/        Program header files

In a successful build the libraries and binaries are installed in the package 'bin' and 'lib' directories, header files needed for program development are put in the 'include' directory. The contents of these directories should be copied to some system directory available in the normal user paths. For example, to install in /usr/local


% cd /<path>/voclient
% sudo cp bin/* /usr/local/bin
% sudo cp lib/* /usr/local/lib
% sudo cp include/* /usr/local/include

Supported Platforms

This release currently supports the following platforms:



    Mac OSX             32-bit and 64-bit Intel, OSX 10.6 and later
    Linux 32-bit        32-bit Linux systems (Fedora, Redhat, Ubuntu, etc)
    Linux 64-bit        64-bit Linux systems (Fedora, Redhat, Ubuntu, etc)

Additional platforms will be added as needed.

BUGS

This is the first public release

REVISION HISTORY

May 2013 - First public release

AUTHOR

Michael Fitzpatrick (fitz@noao.edu), May 2013

Index

NAME

SYNOPSIS

Command-Line Tools

Programming Interfaces

Dependency Libraries

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 04:49:15 GMT, May 24, 2013