1. It is certainly possible to set up maxima on a server
so that anyone can connect
to it from a web browser and type in a command or several commands.
This is a hour or two's work for someone familiar with
maxima and webservers in lisp. (unfortunately, not a lot of
people in this group.)
2. Running different users in the same maxima is probably a
bad idea, so you end up running a separate process for each
user, at least to simplify things.
3. Keeping some user from taking over your machine can
probably be prevented by limiting the CPU time. Keeping some
user from trashing your machine by doing file I/O requires
some thought.
Downloading all of maxima to a user when people routinely have
40 gigabyte disks on their PCs may not be such a bad idea.
The real win for a "web server maxima" may be if it is going to
be updated daily with the latest mathematical discoveries,
will always be run on the fastest machine in the world, and
has access to all the software that you can't afford to
buy for your home.
Or some mixture of those attributes.
David Bremner wrote:
>
> 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