May 2005IVOA Interoperability Meeting, Kyoto 1

IRAF Web Services

Michael FitzpatrickNOAO

THE US NATIONAL VIRTUAL OBSERVATORY

May 2005IVOA Interoperability Meeting, Kyoto 2

Project Goals

• Expose IRAF tasks as web-services• Make it easy to add new services

– For us, and for the “average” astronomer

• Make it easy to run them elsewhere– Closer to the data– On large compute servers

May 2005IVOA Interoperability Meeting, Kyoto 3

Project Goals

However…• Not all tasks make a good web-service

– Too many params– Too atomic (I.e. what you really want requires

multiple IRAF task calls)– Interactive tasks not supported

• Average astronomer doesn’t want to know how to create a web service

• NOAO can’t host IRAF services for all of VO

May 2005IVOA Interoperability Meeting, Kyoto 4

Challenges

• Compiled Tasks• Script Tasks• Startup costs• State

May 2005IVOA Interoperability Meeting, Kyoto 5

Web Service Architecture

May 2005IVOA Interoperability Meeting, Kyoto 6

Service Description and Generation

• New functionality implemented as IRAF task in external package

• XML Descriptor File for service class and all methods

• XSLT stylesheet for Java endpoint code generation

• Hand-coded servlets for support• WSDL automatically generated

May 2005IVOA Interoperability Meeting, Kyoto 7

Future/Current Work

• Public Release• Automatic deployment• Client test-code generation• User Sessions• Generalize for other legacy software• VOStore

– Allow user to upload data (or 3rd party source), process, return

• Async services– Submit “large” jobs

• Grid / Parallelization?• Astrogrid/CEA integration