On 5/22/08, Luis Da Silva <massutt at gmail.com> wrote:
> I want to make a web application, using MATHML as data entry and MAXIMA
> who can interpret this xml and return the result of the mathematical
> expression written in MathML.
> There is some MAXIMA API to communicate with java?
> With MAXIMA is possible to interpret a document MathML?
Luis, there are various solutions for various problems here.
(1) about MathML: there is an add-on package, maximaMathML,
which enables MathML input and output. I have fixed some bugs
in the output part today, which I will commit to CVS.
However it appears there are also some bugs in the input part.
I will take a look at it. I am pretty sure it should be easy to fix.
(2) about Java / Maxima communication: the only way which
really works at present is to open a socket in Java to talk to
a separate Maxima process. There is an add-on package,
maxima-server.lisp, which implements an ordinary Unix-style
server which listens for socket connections and forks an
instance of Maxima to serve each one.
It is theoretically possible to run Maxima in a Java-based Lisp
implementation; then you could have direct Java to Maxima
function calls. I tried that with ABCL (Lisp written in Java) but
ABCL has too many bugs and I couldn't make it work right.
(3) about using Maxima as a computational engine: Maxima
assumes that there is always someone at the console, so
Maxima asks questions sometimes and waits for a response.
This makes it more difficult to write program-to-program interfaces,
but many such interfaces have been written, and I guess each one
solves the question-asking problem in some way.
I have tried to get Maxima to stop asking questions, but I haven't
figured it out yet.
Take a look at the related projects page:
http://maxima.sourceforge.net/relatedprojects.html
Maybe you can get some useful ideas there.
Good luck and let us know how it goes. I will commit some bug
fixes for maximaMathML this weekend.
best
Robert Dodier