On Thu, 8 May 2003, Norman Gray wrote:

>
> Greetings, all.
>
> I'm busy writing the IVOA talk for next week, but I'm getting nervous
> that there is rather little time left to do what I realise is quite a lot.
>

Hmm. Yes. A set of valid urls and documentation is important although I
suppose that so long as what you say at the meeting is in place by the end
of the meeting there won't be much of a problem.

> We need to have:
>
> * a URL for Hdx documentation. I'm busy writing that, but it
> would probably be best pointed to by the URL which designates
> the HDX namespace, <http://www.starlink.ac.uk/HDX> -- DavidG,
> would you be able to get Steve to set up a redirect from that to
> <http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/star/java/hdx>, which is
> where I'll put overview docs. "302 Moved Temporarily" is how the
> current set of redirects are set up. That would be pointed to by,
> and point back to, ...
>
> * A released set of javadocs, available at a public URL. I think this
> is quite important, not least because it shows that we have actually
> written a lot. The problem is, what javadocs do we show? We could
> just tag what we've got in the repository now and bundle that up.
> That's part of the larger question of...
>
> * A released codeset. Tim (or was it Al) suggested at the last meeting
> that we should brandish CDs of the software. It's possibly too late
> for that, but we should be able to bundle up what we have at present
> and make it a download. It doesn't matter that it won't be on a CD,
> as long as...

It was Al. One thing I think you have to be wary of is bundling up
everything and saying "look here is all our code" because people tend to
find that sort of thing overwhelming. I think your better bet is to make
targetted releases. ie

 1. A VOTable I/O distribution (jar, source and javadoc)
 2. A tableviewer distribution (possibly with votable.jar included
                                but no need for the source)
 3. HDX/NDX as a single jar and source distribution.
 4. treeview

These are your key libraries (treeview is a special case but FROG and
SPLAT are essentially classical apps but if you start packaging up core
functionality as standalone jar files it might make it easier to provide
packages separately for these apps).

You need to suck people in with little chunks rather than the whole
system. Targetted emails should be sent to the IVOA mailing lists by the
key authors (ie Mark and Norman rather than Dave). Especially for the
libraries. Possibly sending emails to the list prior to the meeting would
help to kickstart awareness before you get up to talk.

It's possible that AST has already missed the boat (native ast
representation could easily be converted to XML) - people just don't
understand what it can do.

Has any one done a comparison of treeview with VOPlot? Is it a meaningful
thing to do? Announcements of treeview updates should be sent to the
relevant list. Keeps people aware of what is going on.

>
> * We surely should have _one_ URL that we point folk to, where they
> can find everything about the Java work we've been doing. How about
> <http://www.starlink.ac.uk/java>? If need be, I'll volunteer to
> look after that, either with web pages on the RAL machine, or here
> if Steve wants to set up another redirect.
>
> I wondered about discussing this on the stardev list, at the expense
> of bothering everyone. I've included TimJ since he had so many
> forceful ideas of what we should be doing next week. Is there anyone
> else?

Well. I've sent this to stardev anyway :-)

--
Tim Jenness
JAC software
http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/~timj