[Chimera-users] non-GUI use of Chimera

[Daniel Greenblatt]

Hi Charles,

If you do want to support multiple users and simultaneously running 
instances of Chimera, you'd
need to control who gets the request coming from the chimera_send 
script.
To do this, you'd need to dynamically rewrite the 'rendezvous' file 
where chimera_send looks to
see who's listening.

This is located usually in

       /tmp/chim_webinfo-<USERNAME >

where <USERNAME> is the name of the user running Chimera (from the USER 
environment variable).

This file is only in existence while there is an instance of Chimera 
running on the machine, and it is listening for data.
Multiple users on the same system can be running Chimera, each user 
would have their own corresponding file.
The file is user-read-write only.

The first line contains three keys that are used for security purposes 
(each client attempting to send information to Chimera must correctly 
identify these keys), and each of the following lines contains 
information in the format
    port,pid
where pid is the process id of a running Chimera, and port is the port 
number that that instance of Chimera is listening on.

chimera_send will send the request to the most recently registered 
instance of Chimera, i.e. the one at the bottom of the list.
So if the /tmp/chim_webinfo-cmoad file looks like:

43245,787727,838545
4576,98543
2567,98550
3879,98556

chimera_send will send the request to the instance of Chimera with pid 
98556, listening on port 3879 .
Note, the original intent here is for a user to have multiple instances 
of Chimera running on their desktop,
and for them to be able to determine which Chimera will receive the 
file from a web browser, by raising a particular
Chimera window above the others. Each time you raise a Chimera window 
by giving it the focus, that instance rewrites
  the rendezvous file to put itself first (i.e. last in the list). You 
could mimic this behavior programmatically by
rewriting this file from the server-side CGI script depending on where 
the request came from.

Hope this helps!

-Dan

On Tuesday, May 25, 2004, at 01:58 PM, Thomas Goddard wrote:

> Hi Charlie,
>
>   Can I try your Chimera web interface?  It's a neat idea that we may
> have other uses for.
>
>   I don't understand how your web server can handle multiple 
> simultaneous
> requests that require Chimera rendering.  If you send the requests to 
> one
> instance of Chimera that you keep running it is possible that a 
> request will
> get received in the middle of processing some earlier request causing 
> havoc.
>
> 	Tom
> _______________________________________________
> Chimera-users mailing list
> Chimera-users at cgl.ucsf.edu
> http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/mailman/listinfo/chimera-users
>