Currently Apps are distributed from a single physical directory under http://bioviz.org/igbserver/.

IGB is able to list them in its internal App Manager GUI because it reads this file on start-up: http://bioviz.org/igbserver/repository.xml
When a user installs an App, IGB just downloads from the location indicated in http://bioviz.org/igbserver/repository.xml.

The file repository.xml lists our five currently available Apps as "resource" tags. For each App it lists a relative URL. For example:

resource:

• id="23andMe-snp-converter/9.0.0"
• symbolicname="23andMe-snp-converter"
• presentationname="23andMe SNP Converter"
• uri="optional/23andMe-snp-converter-9.0.0.jar"
• version="9.0.0"

Find out: can a "uri" attribute point to an absolute URL instead?

For example:

resource:

• id="IgbApp/0.0.1"
• symbolicname="testapp"
• presentationname="A Test App"
• uri="https://example.com/jars/23andMe-snp-converter-9.0.0.jar"
• version="9.0.0"

This matters because it would be very useful to be able to store assets in S3 or other places separately from the repository.xml file.

This task is to determine if we can do that.

Be sure to describe the steps you took to determine if we can do it or not.