Isabelle F. Scholl, Yann Girard, Arthur Bykowski (Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale, CNRS/Université Paris XI, Bâtiment 121, F-91405 ORSAY )
Reference URL: http://www.medoc-ias.u-psud.fr/new_archive
This paper presents the architecture of a Java web-based grahical interface dedicated to the access of the SOHO Data archive. This application allows local and remote users to search in the SOHO data catalog and retrieve the SOHO data files from the archive. It has been developped at MEDOC (Multi-Experiments Data and Operations Centre), located at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (Orsay, France), which is one of the European Archives for the SOHO data.
This development is part of a joint effort between ESA, NASA and IAS in order to implement long term archive systems for the SOHO data.
The software architecture is built as a client-server application above a set of components such as an HTTP server, a JDBC gateway with the Java Servlet API, a RDBMS server, a data server and a Web browser; and using the following languages: Java, JavaScript, SQL. HTML pages and CGI scripts were not powerful enough to allow user interaction during a multi-instruments catalog search; this type of requirement enforced the choice of Java as the main language.
We also discuss performance issues, security problems and portability on different Web browsers and operating systems.