On 12/21/11, Brian Chacko <brianchacko at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the reply. The goal is to write a simple application (standalone)
> to perform numerical computations (calculations + plots) that Maxima
> provides. Yes, the GUI feature also need to be embedded in the application.
>
> I am very much interested in the third approach as to what you have
> suggested. Could you please elaborate on this? I have experience with Qt
> development.
Well, it sounds like you need to create something very similar to
wxMaxima except you'll use Qt instead of wxWidgets.
The GUI application talks to Maxima through a socket.
The application opens a server socket, and launches Maxima with
a command line argument (-s <port>) to tell it to connect back to
the application's port. Then the application sends expressions to
Maxima, which writes back the results. The messages are plain
text; there is no special protocol.
My advice is to get the socket stuff working first. Once you have
that in place you can elaborate the GUI ad infinitum.
If you have not worked with sockets before, just try to figure that
out first. I think you can find lots of examples on the web.
Hope this helps. I've cc'd the Maxima mailing list. Please keep
the mailing list in the loop so others can respond too.
best
Robert Dodier