Using Mosaic by Remote Control

NCSA Mosaic (version 1.1 or later) can be operated by remote control. This means that an application -- any application -- can directly operate Mosaic, by specifying documents on the network to view, directing it to open new windows, etc.

How It Works

Mosaic has a signal handler for the "extra", normally unused signal called SIGUSR1. When that signal is received by a running Mosaic process, the signal handler determines its process ID or pid (via the getpid() call) and derives a config filename:

        /tmp/xmosaic.pid

So, for example, if the running Mosaic's pid is 1343, the config filename is:

        /tmp/xmosaic.1343

This config file is assumed to contain two lines of text:

The first line is a directive, either goto (which means jump right to a document) or newwin (which means open a new window and use that window to display a document).
The second line is the URL of the document to download and view.

So, an example config file that tells Mosaic to view document file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ in an already-open window is:

goto
file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/

(Note that a goto command will cause the document to be viewed in the most-recently-used document view window, if a Mosaic session has multiple open windows.)

How To Use It

One way to use this capability is to take advantage of Mosaic's interaction and display functionality to provide cheap and low-overhead online, possibly context-sensitive help for other applications. The first time help is requested in your application, fork off a new Mosaic process with a command-line argument corresponding to the appropriate help document, which can of course be pulled over the network in real time or retrieved from the local disk. Subsequent help requests can use the running Mosaic process by writing a config file (the Mosaic process ID is returned from the initial fork() call) and using the kill() call to send a SIGUSR1.

Another use is Mosaic as a general hypermedia display engine for mail readers, news readers, HTML editors, and similar applications. For example, we're currently building capabilities into the Emacs html-mode.el package developed by one of the Mosaic authors (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu) to provide transparent HTML previewing via a single keystroke. Other people are putting hooks into existing mail and news handlers. More information will be available when it's available.

Future Possibilities

Have any ideas for future possibilities along these lines? We're thinking both in terms of what can be done with this method as well as more advanced capabilities involving two-way network communication for the future. Drop us a line if you have any interesting thoughts.

Acknowledgements

Thanks much to Ken Evans (evans@phebos.aps.anl.gov) who suggested the concept and contributed initial code.