Application -- Venue interaction

[Eric Olson]

Terry described his multiblast application and how it would like to 
interact with the Venue.  There are features he needs that aren't 
quite finished yet and need to be addressed.  I was unable to get a 
current working solution so hopefully other people can look at this and 
address the part that is missing after reading the description of the 
issues below.

Overview -- allow an application to interact more transparently with the 
venue and data in the venue.

Unresolved issues:
 - (Registering and) Launching the application from the venue and also 
providing it with the venue url.  Currently, seperately starting the 
application and copying and pasting venue urls makes venue interaction 
cumbersome.

background on application:
 - can search through the filenames in the venue (with wildcards)
 - retrieve a file or multiple files,
 - process these files and/or create new files,
 - upload files back into the venue.

Here is what it asks the AG software for (beyond previously typical AG 2 
use).  There is already a tool that fulfills the first two requirements 
below, so items 3 and 4 are the items that still need to be addressed.

1) Download/Upload data from the venue's datastore without actually 
entering the venue.
2) Obtain the filenames and locations of the files so the names can be 
searched through before they are downloaded.
3) From an item in the venue (likely a data file or a service), launch a 
specific application.  Provide a standard way to register which 
application gets launched and how it is supposed to behave (with added 
venue enhancements or not).
4) Provide the venue url to the application being launched ( so that 
applications can do operations such as item 1 and 2 above).

Solutions:

1 & 2) Bob has written a datastore client application that can store, 
search, and retrieve data without entering the venue.

3) We haven't clearly defined the difference between when to open data 
normally (as the os would start it) and when to open the data with added 
venue features (perhaps right-click and select "open" or "venue open", 
etc.).  We also need a simple tool to help set this up.

We need to make the similar decisions on how to start venue applications 
that are not related to a particular venue data item.

Other people have been thinking about this, and this part has not been 
finished yet although quite a bit of support structure is in place.

4) Ivan suggested there is a substitution available (although subject to 
change for a final solution) that could substitute the venue url as an 
argument when launching an application.  I was unable to get that far yet
because of complications mixing it with the previous item (registering and 
launching an application with arguments).


So, do we have the ability now or can we provide an easy way for apps 
like Terry's to launch from the venue (including registering it somehow) 
and also have it know about the venue (url)?

Thanks,
Eric