Hi,
On Feb 12, 2011, at 1:53 PM, Robert Dodier wrote:
>
>
> thanks for the update. LON-CAPA looks really interesting.
> I wonder if you have any comments about using Maxima
> in such a system. If you have any wish-list items that would
> make life easier for you, I'd be interested to hear about it.
Well, yes, I have a wish list, but I feel bad presenting it, as we have no time or resources to work on it. Being responsible for an open source system myself, I know what it feels like to get wish lists that come with no offer for helping out.
Essentially, we would love to have MAXIMA as a true kernel that we can talk to. Currently, we do glorified screen scraping, i.e., we have a demon process talking to a number of running MAXIMAs like through a terminal, see http://www.lon-capa.org/maximaasserver.html
As we are having high student numbers and lots of transactions, we need scalability.
In order to use less duct-tape, we would need:
* MAXIMA itself managing a number of running child process (like Apache, etc)
* Providing a port to send requests to these child processes (like Apache, etc)
* A highly predictable command-reply sequence. We really struggle with MAXIMA having questions back for LON-CAPA (like "Is x positive?"), which of course are unanswerable. If an expression given by a student is not completely defined, we just need an error message back, and MAXIMA should not wait for an answer. Ideally: one line in, one line out, always.
* A way to run MAXIMA safely, i.e., without any file or operating system access
* A way to cleanly and quickly reset MAXIMA between requests: all variables, definitions, assumptions, etc.
- Gerd.
--
Gerd Kortemeyer, Ph.D.
Michigan State University
http://www.lite.msu.edu/kortemeyer/