Dear Bowo,
As part of the STACK project we are doing something very similar. Our
current priority with STACK is to make the PHP connection with Maxima
secure, reliable and fast. It might be a good idea if you and my colleage
Jonathan, who is currently working on this, exchance technical ideas off
the list before reporting back.
Since a web interface in PHP is something generally useful we have decided
to factor this interface out of the main STACK code to help with easy
re-use.
Our approach is different than just allowing a worksheet, but it could be
easily adapted for this. Plots have proved a challenge, but we do have a
solution for this already.
Chris
On Sun, 4 Mar 2007, Robert Dodier wrote:
> Hello Bowo,
>
>> I don't know if this is a correct place to announce this.
>
> Yes, you've come to the right place.
>
>> I have just created a PHP program to access Maxima on the server
>> interactively from a website. I call it MaximaPHP.
>
> Terrific. I have put a link on the Maxima web site. See:
> http://maxima.sourceforge.net/relatedprojects.shtml
>
>> I need some advices regarding security measures that I implemented
>> here. Are there other Maxima commands that I need to filter out?
>
> I don't really know much about that. You might look at Mediawiki algebra
> extension (link on the page mentioned above). I'm pretty sure that project
> has some security measures in place. But trying to identify all the
> possible leaks is tricky. Maybe it is possible to get the web server to
> execute Maxima in a sandbox of some kind. I don't know what's possible
> there.
>
> You might consider disallowing any symbol which begins with ?
> since that allows access to Lisp symbols, e.g. ?load = Lisp LOAD function.
> But, again, I think running in a sandbox is better. Let us know if you
> make some progress on that, I'm pretty sure others would be interested.
>
> Thanks for the news & keep up the good work,
> Robert Dodier
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