visit
http://www.franz.com/success/demos/maxima/
which will allow you to use maxima on someone else's machine
where it has been placed in a virtual "sand box".
The linkage to your own maxima is not very hard, but as you
point out, keeping your students from making a mess of
your computer, intentionally or unintentionally, is more
of a challenge.
You could also link to integrals.com.
RJF
Ben Crowell wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a preexisting Perl CGI application (http://www.lightandmatter.com/spotter/spotter.html)
> that I would like to interface with maxima. For instance, I'd like to add a little
> utility to it for doing integrals, sort of like Wolfram's integrals.com. The app
> is something my students use (I teach physics), and it already has a mathematical
> input language that my students are used to. The language is not all that different
> from Maxima's, but, e.g., it allows implicit multiplication. So the idea is that,
> rather than telling them they can go to integrals.com to compute an integral
> they don't know how to do, I can have them enter it into my CGI application
> in the notation they already know, and my app will then parse it and convert
> it to Maxima syntax, and display the result (either as ascii-art math, or
> as LaTeX-generated graphics).
>
> Does anyone have any experience with embedding Maxima in a script like this?
> For example, I want to make sure there isn't any tricky way for users to
> do inappropriate things, like deleting all my files. (OK, since it's going
> through my own parser first, it would probably be hard for them to accomplish
> that anyway, but I'd still be interested in hearing if anyone else has tackled
> the issue of sanitizing input appropriately.) It would also be nice to make
> sure they can't inadvertently send my server spinning off on a computation
> that will eat up 99% of its CPU for the next month :-)
>
> Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
>
> Ben Crowell
>
> (Moderator: Sorry about sending this earlier from a different address than the
> one from which I was subscribed. I got a message saying that one was awaiting
> moderation, since it wasn't from a subscriber. Please delete that one.)
>
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