Greetings,
Recently I decided it would be fun to write my own Web interface for
Maxima. I know it's been done a couple of times before, but I'd like
to write an application that takes full advantage of LaTeX rendering,
JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest to provide a responsive, full-featured
experience. Some features I have in mind are function menus, shortcut
buttons to simplify/factor/numerically evaluate/etc., equation
history, and the ability to save sessions on the server and resume
them later.
I have the basic interface to Maxima and LaTeX rendering mostly
complete, but one of the things I noticed on your "Design Notes" page
was the addition of a "safe mode," something my application could
definitely benefit from. (I try to strip out as much harmful input as
I can, but things like asksign and the interactive evaluation of
integrals keep tripping me up.) It's a shame that Maxima wasn't
accepted into Google's Summer of Code, and it's a shame that I don't
know Lisp (I was raised on ML), because I'd definitely like to see
that implemented.
Sorry if I'm spamming the mailing list, but I just thought I'd let
you guys know what I'm working on. I'm finishing my sophomore year at
Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, and you'll
be able to play with my Web frontend at http://math.msarnoff.org/
(it's down currently because I need to get myself a server). Feedback
would be appreciated once things start rolling. Who knows, maybe I'll
take up Lisp this summer and sink my teeth into the source code.
Thanks, and keep up the good work.
Matt Sarnoff