The current approach of users logging in to a virtual desktop has multiple drawbacks and limitations. Examples:
Possible security issues (in various ways)
Need for 2 logins, annoying and confusing
Need for cronjobs and shell-scripts to handle bookings, more to manage
Need to mantain virtual desktop software
UI design limitations
Lack of monitoring for non-active users
...
It should be possible to construct a modern backend/frontend framework in e.g. HTML5. Possible division of functionality could be:
Server/backend:
Communicate with hardware, handle requests from client (move telescope, record data, monitor status).
Possibly do various data formatting and number crunching activities, such as spectral averaging, FFTs, VDIF formatting etc.
Return data to client and/or archive and/or external target (e.g. VDIF stream).
Client/frontend:
Provide continuous monitoring, also for non-active users, of telescope pointing, misc data (e.g. weather) etc.
Provide booking system with restricted telescope control (can only communicate with the server when booked etc.)
Provide sky visibility plots for observation planning? Would be nice to see the elevation vs UTC of various objects (Sun, min GLON, max GLON etc.) in the coming 24h. Something like https://observability.date/ but tailored for SALSA.
Provide localised UI (language, numbers, time)
Data archive access
Provide interactive data editing, loading from archive, doing baseline fitting, multiple-gaussian-fitting, exports to various formats (FITS, PNG, ASCII).
The current approach of users logging in to a virtual desktop has multiple drawbacks and limitations. Examples:
It should be possible to construct a modern backend/frontend framework in e.g. HTML5. Possible division of functionality could be: Server/backend:
This should be the way forward!