Re: [Axiom-developer] browser front end, statement of plans and progress

[Alfredo Portes]

Hi Bill,

> No I am still very much also in favour of the type of browser front
> end for Axiom that Kai Kaminski worked on almost two years ago.
> I do think a browser front end for Axiom is a good idea -
> particularly if it scales easily from desktop to public web server.
> My point in part was that this has already largely been done, at
> least in so much as the Sage interface to Axiom exposes Axiom to
> the Sage Notebook interface. None of this involved re-writing any
> existing Axiom source code. I think it makes good sense to continue
> to build on this work.

I do not know how many people in this list have used Axiom via the Sage
notebook. Like you said I think using their notebook is a better idea than
starting from scratch. Their notebook uses much of the AJAX magic that
Tim would like to have for Axiom. We could ask William for permission to
use it (not that is necessary given that is open source, but it is a good
gesture) and patch it for Axiom needs, just like Sage does with Pyrex.
I think given that Tim would like this by next year, this will reduce the
development time by months.

Other things then can be addressed is Martin's concern about the
+++ documentation. I also would like also to have this to create something
similar to javadocs or python style, in which you can get the api without having
to read the whole literate document, if want you want is just a quick
info. I know
the Sage notebook allows to display latex already but I do not know if it has a
good rendering. Also the d&d pamphlet feature can be addressed.

The link in the frontpage of MathAction:
http://sage-notebook.axiom-developer.org/106 does not point to useful
Axiom
examples like you had before, maybe  you can fix this. Tim probably can look at
it, and see if this is what he would like to have. I think this work
could attract more
contributors.

Regards,

Alfredo

PS: On another note, with the help of Ralf's ideas, I started writing
a Gedit plugin
to allow Literate programming. Currently I have a basic prototype working:

https://alfredoportes.com/~alfredo/lp.png

You can click on a button and the documentation gets extracted and
compiled using noweb and latex. I plan to add also something similar
to what Bill has on MathAction to extract the chunks of code.

This is just a trial and error, but my final goal is to actually
write a plugin for Eclipse
to allow literate programming, so it feels natural writing a pamphlet
inside of it, without loosing the features provided by the IDE or
other plugins (auto compiling, class browser, etc).