CHIANTI in Zarr? about fiasco HOT 4 OPEN

Related to #49

from fiasco.

I do not know what Zarr is so I can't tell. Yes, it might be a good idea to be able to access the database by http.

from fiasco.

actually, it already possible to get the database files:
wget chiantidatabase.org/sswidl/ioneq/chianti.ioneq
chiantidatabase.org/sswidl/dbase is the equivalent of XUVTOP

from fiasco.

Zarr is a file format similar to HDF5, but allows for inspection and access over http (i.e. you don't need to download the file locally to look at things like the metadata).

Certainly you can pull down CHIANTI files over http. However, my idea is that you really have an API to the data itself (not to individual files) so that you could, for example, query the energy levels of Fe XVIII without having any files local to you.

I've already prototyped this with HDF5 and it does work, but it is slow. Basically, you can use fiasco, just like you normally would, but pulling the data from the cloud rather than disk. This is how I run the examples in Read the Docs because it takes too long to download the build the database.

from fiasco.