Octave Online Interface

[Shane Carr]

Good morning,

My name is Shane Carr, and I am an engineering student at Washington
University in St. Louis.

As a summer project, I decided to try writing an updated online interface
for GNU Octave.

I read some of the old threads in the mailing list about making an online
GUI for Octave.  They described two main stumbling blocks: security and
performance.  I made sure to address these concerns.

- For Security: I have Octave running inside a restricted SELinux sandbox. 
I have not been able to perform any malicious attacks on my system using
Octave within the sandbox.

- For Performance: I currently have the application running in the Rackspace
Cloud.  The application can delegate processes to several separate cloud
servers in order to support more simultaneous users.  In addition, the
server sends a SIGINT to Octave after a command has taken longer than 5
seconds (10 seconds when you are logged in).

Here's what I came up with.  I just got it to a working state a few days
ago, and it is still very much in "beta".  But for the most part, it works
well:

http://octave-online.net/

I was wondering if the Octave community could play around with the GUI a
bit, making sure that your favorite commands work and stuff like that.  No
one besides me has yet interacted with the site.

Thanks!

Regards, Shane

P.S. Some other notes:

- The server is written on the Node.js platform using Socket.IO to enable
real-time output from the prompt.

- The GUI only works in HTML5-compliant browsers.  This is now about 70% of
the market.  The most notable exception of a browser in which the GUI won't
work is Internet Explorer 8 and lower.  The site works best in the latest
versions of Chrome and Firefox.

- Cloud serves are not free.  If more cloud servers are ever required to
support the site usage, I have thought about giving users the option to
subscribe in exchange for more computation time.

- The version of Octave being run on the server is compiled with a handful
of changes to assist the plotting process.  In particular, rather than
streaming the plot to X11, I modified the Octave source to instead tell
Gnuplot to save the plot as an SVG vector image, which is then transmitted
to the browser GUI.  I'm trying to figure out how to upload the source code
changes to a repository on BitBucket, but BitBucket doesn't seem to like
subrepos in Hg repositories.

- There are currently two warnings coming from Octave that I haven't
entirely figured out: the "no graphical display found" that aways greets you
when you first load the application, and the "undefined variable: textcolor"
when you try to make a plot.  Maybe someone has seen these before and knows
a solution.



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