3.3 System Properties

System properties are a way of getting information into the Java runtime - they are a bit like environment variables. There are two ways to set them when using STILTS: either on the command line using arguments of the form -Dname=value (see Section 3.2) or in a file in your home directory named .starjava.properties, in the form of a name=value line. Thus submitting the flag

   -Dvotable.strict=true

   #  Force strict interpretation of the VOTable standard.
   votable.strict=true

The following system properties have special significance to STILTS:

http.proxyHost

Can be used to force HTTP access to go via a named proxy; may be required if you are attempting access to remote data or services from behind a firewall configured to block direct HTTP connections. See java documentation for this property for more details.

java.awt.headless

May need to be set to "true" if running the plotting tasks on a headless server. You only need to worry about this if you see error messages complaining about headlessness.

java.io.tmpdir

The directory in which STILTS will write any temporary files it needs. This is usually only done if the -disk flag has been specified (see Section 2.1).

jdbc.drivers

Can be set to a (colon-separated) list of JDBC driver classes using which SQL databases can be accessed (see Section 3.4).

jel.classes

Can be set to a (colon-separated) list of classes containing static methods which define user-provided functions for synthetic columns or subsets. (see Section 10.7.3).

mark.workaround

If set to "true", this will work around a bug in the mark()/reset() methods of some java InputStream classes. These are rather common, including in Sun's J2SE system libraries. Use this if you are seeing errors that say something like "Resetting to invalid mark". Currently defaults to "false".

service.maxparallel

Raises the maximum number of concurrent queries that may be made during a multi-cone operation. You should only increase this value with great care since you risk overloading servers and becoming unpopular with data centres. As a rule, you should only increase this value if you have obtained permission from the data centres whose services on which you will be using the increased parallelism.

star.basicauth.user

star.basicauth.password

If set, these will provide username and password for HTTP Basic Authentication. Any time the application attempts to access an HTTP URL and is met by a 401 Unauthorized response, it will try again supplying these user credentials. This is a rather blunt instrument, since the same identity is supplied regardless of which URL is being accessed, but it may be of some use in accessing basic-authentication protected services.

startable.readers

Can be set to a (colon-separated) list of custom table format input handler classes (see SUN/252).

startable.storage

Can be set to determine the default storage policy. Setting it to "disk" has basically the same effect as supplying the "-disk" argument on the command line (see Section 2.1). Other possible values are "adaptive", "memory", "sideways" and "discard"; see SUN/252. The default is "adaptive", which means storing smaller tables in memory, and larger ones on disk.

startable.unmap

Determines whether and how unmapping of memory mapped buffers is done. Possible values are "sun" (the default) or "none". In most cases you are advised to leave this alone, but in the event of unmapping-related JVM crashes (not expected!), setting it to none may help.

startable.writers

Can be set to a (colon-separated) list of custom table format output handler classes (see SUN/252).

votable.namespacing

Determines how namespacing is handled in input VOTable documents. Known values are "none" (no namespacing, xmlns declarations in VOTable document will probably confuse parser), "lax" (anything that looks like it is probably a VOTable element will be treated as a VOTable element) and "strict" (VOTable elements must be properly declared in one of the correct VOTable namespaces). May also be set to the classname of a uk.ac.starlink.votable.Namespacing implementation. The default is "lax".

votable.strict

Set true for strict enforcement of the VOTable standard when parsing VOTables. This prevents the parser from working round certain common errors, such as missing arraysize attributes on FIELD or PARAM elements with datatype="char". False by default.

votable.version

Selects the version of the VOTable standard which output VOTables will conform to by default. May take the values "1.0", "1.1", "1.2" or "1.3". By default, version 1.3 VOTables are written.