[Axiom-developer] RE: Help/Guidance/anything...

[Bill Page]

Alfredo,

On August 18, 2006 3:21 AM you wrote:

> Hope not to take your time, but I would like to ask you couple
> of things, and go over couple Tim's ideas.

Time is something that should be freely given ... :)

> Tim Daly wrote:
>>Fifth, the XMLHttpRequest object is a JavaScript object that allows
>>you to construct an XML request without leaving the page. You store 
>>data in the object, invoke the send method, and then go thru a
>>5-state machine to get the information back. If Axiom is set up to
>>listen for the requests then Axiom can sit behind the browser and
>>service requests to do anything, like start graphics independently
>>or start graphics and store the resulting image and forward it to
>>the browser for inlining.
>
> Are you assuming that all this will happen outside the Wiki. Wouldn't
> be better to pass the pamphlet after dragged and dropped to the Wiki
> for processing? Thanks to the work done by Bill and Sage developers,
> it is possible to do inline commands and display it as Latex inside
> MathAction (Maxima and others now, Axiom probably later I assume).
> Or what you are looking for is to create another type of user
> interface for Axiom?

I think what Tim is talking about is more similar to the Sage Notebook
interface than it is to MathAction. MathAction does not use a "live"
Axiom process running in the background. The only interaction with
Axiom is during 'Preview' and 'Save'.

AJAX (XMLHttpRequest etc.) might still be very useful in MathAction
however in order to reduce the network traffic during a preview
operation, for example.

> I assume that another solution will be to have this machinery you
> described in the browser, and then have an option "Save to Wiki".

This latter suggestion is possible and is very similar to the method
used by TiddlyWiki. See also Bob McElrath's version of TiddlyWiki
with the jsMath and Axiom interface.

http://bob.mcelrath.org/tiddlymath/tiddlyjsmath.html
http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath

I think that for personal use (maybe even in Doyen) this is a
very nice wiki model.

Also if you haven't already done this, I think you might find it
useful to go back and review the early part of the discussions on
the AxiomUI project with Kai Kaminski about this time last year.
Check the axiom-developer archives.

>>So the game is to pick on a literate document, drag it onto the
>>browser,

> Like this: http://doyen.sytes.net/Test . This page is inside ZWiki.
> If you drag and drop an object into the textbox, it will try to
> look if it has .pamphlet extension outputting what it found. This
> happens without reloading the page like you said using the
> XMLHttpRequest.

Yes. This is a good start. I am not sure whether Tim has even looked
at this. Some of his comments seem written without knowledge of that
part of your work.

Perhaps it is appropriate to ask: What else besides just copying
the source text would we want the browser to do in this case?

Tim is thinking about updating a local installation of Axiom with
some new packages, tests and other files. It seems to me that in
the current Doyen/MathAction model this is best done by the
pamphlet mechanism in the wiki server, not in JavaScript on the
browser. E.g. one might imagine adding 'Build' and 'Run' commands
to supplement the existing 'tangle' function on the Pamphlet
thumbnail page so that it also becomes a kind of collaborative
web-based IDE (which also works local as Doyen).

>>fire up a firefox extension to read the clipboard, write the file
>> into the appropriate place, 

> This can be done by calling a script from the XMLHttpRequest. In
> the example above, it calls a Python script. So the script can
> take care of writing the files, calling Axiom, etc.

>> and then talk to axiom to compile and load the
>> file and build the documentation. 

> Then it comes back to the question of ZWiki and the work already
> done in MathAction to take care of this.

Again from my point of view this functionality is best implemented
on the server side, not in JavaScript.

If you choose another model like TiddlyWiki for example where there
is no "server side" then of course this would have to be done in
the browser. But this is not how Doyen works now.

>So my questions are: 
>
> Is it going to be a drag and drop box on the Wiki??? or is it
> going to located in the edit page??

I like the way you have implemented it now because it scales easily
to MathAction. We could implement your current drag-and-drop there
right now.

> After a pamphlet is dragged and dropped, is a new page with the
> document added to the wiki? 

I would prefer additional "IDE" type commands on the pamphlet
thumbnail as I suggested above.

> Sorry if I am totally off target (I should know what we are
> looking for after all this time), but I would like to know where
> to go from here?

No, you are asking the right questions. Thank you for continuing
this work.

Regards,
Bill Page.