Richard Fateman writes:
> I don't know what you really have in mind "generating interactive
> web pages". Can you write out a scenario or two of what
> you would want?
>
I'm afraid the idea is still a little half baked.
The the idea is more allow people to evaluate some simple expressions,
without downloading and installing software. On the other hand
because even the simplest computations can explode, I don't really
want to run them on the web server.
One scenario: I have a catalog of families of polytopes:
( one page is here.
http://www.cs.unb.ca/~bremner/PolytopeBase/catalog/dwarfcube.html ).
These integrate bibliographic info with code (currently perl) to
generate descriptions of the polytopes. Currently in order to
experiment (i.e. what does the matrix of coefficients look like, or
let me generate this polytope and feed it to my program), people have
to download some perl and possibly install perl. I would like to make
the process more painless, have some form fields on the web page that
the users can fill in, and have the data generated within their
browser.
Maxima is overkill for the computations needed here (Basically big
integers, rationals are needed).
Upon reflection, I suppose there are two separate issues. One is a
kind of notebook front-end, runnable from within a web browser. The
other is a maxima backend running as a java applet. Both of these are
probably (overly?) ambitious projects.
db