TOPCAT is able to communicate with other tools using one or other of two messaging protocols:
An example of the kind of thing which can be done might be:SAMP and PLASTIC do much the same job as each other, and work in much the same way. SAMP is an evolution of PLASTIC with a number of technical improvements, and PLASTIC has been deprecated in favour of SAMP since around 2009. PLASTIC is therefore of mainly historical interest, though TOPCAT can still run in PLASTIC mode on request, if you need it to communicate with older tools that can only speak PLASTIC.
The communication architecture of the two protocols is basically the same: all tools communicate with a central "Hub" process, so a hub must be running in order for the messaging to operate. If a hub is running when TOPCAT starts, or if one starts up while TOPCAT is in operation, it will connect to it automatically. If no SAMP hub is running, TOPCAT will set one up during application startup.
TOPCAT can work in either SAMP or PLASTIC mode, but not both at once.
It determines which mode to use at startup:
if the -samp or -plastic flag is supplied
on the command line the corresponding mode will be used;
otherwise it will try to use SAMP.
It is easy to tell which mode is being used by looking at the
Control Window;
in SAMP mode the SAMP panel displaying connection
and message status is visible at the bottom of the right hand panel
(there are a few other changes to the GUI as well).
This communication has two aspects to it: on the one hand TOPCAT can send messages to other applications which causes them to do things, and on the other hand TOPCAT can receive and act on such messages sent by other applications. The sent and received messages are described separately in the subsections below. There are also sections on the, somewhat different, ways to control and monitor messaging operatiion for the cases of SAMP and PLASTIC.
Note that the new activation action framework introduced in TOPCAT v4.6, unlike the activation window in previous versions, in most cases only works with SAMP and not PLASTIC.