On Thu, 25 May 2006 20:57:07 -0700, Matthew Sarnoff <msarnoff at andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> Wow, what an interesting project! The SAJAX terminal is very impressive.
> It is rather slow for me (it looks like it's transmitting
> character-by-character), but still, AJAX never ceases to amaze me.
It _is_ slow if you don't have a fast connection. Perhaps somebody
will fix that by rewriting the AJAX so it only sends certain
characters back. I'm awaiting a volunteer...
> I especially like the support for multiple backends, including Maxima. I'm
> sticking to Maxima for my my interface, though.
You're doing something different, which is very interesting. It will be especially
nice to make it available to calculus students. It's also good if you can somehow
make it easy for other people to make a similar web page. I did that with the
"simple SAGE/PARI" calculator, and a number of other projects picked it up
(e.g., KASH, MAGMA.) Likewise, I got the "SAJAX" terminal by modifying
something from another site.
>> How do you get the latex output to work correctly?
>
> Basically the PHP script runs tex(%) through Maxima after executing your
> command; it then grabs the TeX output and sends it to another script that
> streams a PNG image back to the browser. I'm not entirely satisfied with
> the behavior of the tex function (it outputs Plain TeX, and why is it
> using \varkappa?), and one of the things I'd like to do is write an
> up-to-date "latex" function that does a nicer job of formatting. I'm also
> using some of the improvements made by the TeXmacs team.
If you do that, please let me know, so I can use it in SAGE.
SAGE also has latex output, via Maxima's tex command, but
likewise I think it isn't perfect.
>> Cool. Since the SAGE web interfaces attempt to accomplish similar
>> goals (and even directly supports Maxima), and you've clearly learned
>> a lot about what goes into make such interfaces, I hope you might also
>> at least consider looking at what we're doing, and maybe helping
>> us to solve some of our problems, giving us feedback, possibly helping
>> out, etc.
>
> Sure, I'll definitely keep an eye on the SAGE interface, and when I'm not
> busy with my job or my projects, I'll see if I can help.
Thanks!
-- William