One of the problems you will have to address is how to get the
state of maxima from maxima, within java. On MS Windows
the commercial Macsyma maintains a front end, and a macsyma
process, which both seem to contain the expressions. So when
you get a large calculation, both the front end and the back end
run out of memory. With sockets, you can keep these on different
machines, so its not so much of a problem.
If you are going to do parser writing, for maxima in java,
you may want to check out ANTLR.
Dan Stanger