re: front & back end communication / was GUI ...

Maybe you can help me straighten this out in my head...

I'd like to have a lisp based GUI for Maxima which is aware of what is
going on in the kernel, but the consensus is that we want to use a
kernel-GUI connection so that implies a certain disconnection between
the two.  What I (naively) would like to do in such a case is have a
way to let the two lisp environments, GUI and kernel, sync all their
changed variables after a command is executed in either, so they both
effectively are still in the same lisp environment.  For example, if
the GUI wants to update a dialouge due to a package being loaded it is
aware of all the changes the package made to the kernel environment,
and likewise if the GUI is resized the line breaking algorithm
operating in the kernel gets told about that.  I realise this is a
rather redundant setup, but it a) ensures that anything either kernel
or GUI wants to know about the other process they do know, b) if either
fails, the other can restore it to the state right before failure, and
c) it could be handy for generating useful bug reports.  Is there any
good way to do this?

CY

--- Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Macsyma(commercial) has a front/back end communication
> whose specs may be available;  allegro CL has a front-end
> (optional) IDE.  I think that openmath or mathml has the
> significant disadvantage of being about 100 times longer
> than necessary. In the words of one openmath advocate
> "it compresses very well".
> I believe mathlink has no particularly clever encoding
> of mathematica stuff. Just text that looks like mathematica
> commands, embedded in headers and communication stuff.
> And I've been using sockets for a web site (Tilu) written
> in lisp, since 1996 or so.
> 
> There is at least one corba implementation for lisp, and
> there is also Java serialization, remote procedure call.
> 
> I am not an expert on any of this, and I haven't been
> studying this thread, so maybe I've repeated stuff or
> raised dead issues, in which case my apologies.
> 
> RJF
> 
> Karl M. Hegbloom wrote:
> > On Wed, 2003-06-11 at 11:25, James Amundson wrote:
> > 
> >>> I believe Mathematica invented a protocal specifically to deal
> with
> >>>this issue.
> >>
> >>The MathLink protocol has kernel <-> gui communication as a subset.
> It
> >>also provides a mechanism for other programs to communicate with
> >>Mathematica. I admire the *idea* of MathLink, even though I am
> >>unfamiliar with the implementation. 
> > 
> > 
> > It has a non-free licence as well, according to:
> > 
> >  http://www.wolfram.com/solutions/mathlink/license.html
> > 
> > ... which pretty much rules it out.
> > 
> > What about CORBA + OpenMath ?
> > 
> 
> 
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