Crossmatch Development

This wiki contains developer documentation for Crossmatch, the NRAO source-catalog cross-identification Web application.

Go to the Crossmatch home page.

Introduction

Crossmatch is a combination of JavaScript, Java, and XSL programs. Crossmatch was developed at NRAO by Jared Crossley, with scientific oversight from Ed Fomalont. Crossmatch acquires data using the IVOA Simple Cone Search protocol. Crossmatch employs the VO API VOView for a user interface, and also makes use of log4j.

This wiki is an extension of the user documentation at CrossmatchDocumentation.

A slide show explaining how Crossmatch works is available here.

Crossmatch is no longer under development. This page will remain as a reference for any developers who wish to continue development or learn more about the application.

Crossmatch source code can be downloaded here. An installation of VOView will be required. An export of the VOView (and dependent package, net_nvo) source code is available here.

The To-do List

This list of improvements is roughly sorted from highest to lowest priority.

High priority:

  • Add links to the table.
    • Add links to each table row that take the user to that data in the telescope archive. Use the table data to construct these links, if possible.
    • Add links to take the user to an image corresponding to this data row.
  • Think of a way to "collapse" partially-redundant rows so that rows that contain all the same data elements will not take up so many rows. This would help the user work through the table data.
  • Improve server-side exception handling. An exception should never return a stack trace to the user. It should return an HTML document with an error message and a optional link to view/toggle the stack trace. Currently, if not all fields are filled in, CM returns an exception to the user.
  • Increase interactivity between display windows.
  • Add JS form validation to the query page.

Low priority:

  • To speed up server response time, I could implement caching. For example, I could use MemCached.
  • Use django or some automated script to add more SCS services to the list of services to query. Show the "primary" SCS services by default, and include a button to optionally turn on an extended list.

Delegated tasks

  • Doug Tody: Update the VLA Observation Summary catalog service to include appropriate FIELD metadata (UCDs and units) using the info about the Obs Summary output provided by John Benson.
Topic revision: r11 - 2010-04-14, JaredCrossley
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