SkyView V3.2.3 Beware the Ides of March!

Over the next few days (as early as noon 3/15) the SkyView servers will be transitioning to requiring secure HTTP, i.e., HTTPS, URLs to access SkyView services.  This is part of a mandated transition of all NASA (and indeed all federal) web sites. Web users should see little difference.  If you come in using a non-HTTPS URL you will be automatically redirected to the correct URL.  However users who access SkyView through batch services may see a difference since the software that accesses SkyView may not automatically follow the redirect.  In particular, Java’s network library  will not automatically follow redirects which transition from HTTP to HTTPS.   Java (and any other framework that exhibits similar behavior) tools can be programmed to explicitly follow redirects, or the HTTPS URL can be given directly.

Since SkyView-in-a-Jar is written in Java it is sensitive to this change.  When you are using SkyView-in-a-Jar it retrieves survey data from SkyView using information in survey description files. Until version 3.2.3 those files had HTTP URLs.  With this version all the survey description files have been updated to use HTTPS URLs.  We have updated the survey XML files to use HTTPS addresses and it had been our thought that users of recent jar files would be OK since the program would detect the new survey description files and download them automatically.  However we have since recognized that the base URL for the survey description files needs to be updated.  So we recommend all SkyView-in-a-Jar users update to the latest version of the Jar (at least version 3.2.3).

Update: 3/17:  Small updates have been made to the Jar that may fix issues seen by Windows users of SkyView-in-a-Jar.  Our apologies for not catching these earlier.

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