RE: [Axiom-developer] NotebookWiki

[Page, Bill]

On Tuesday, September 05, 2006 8:19 PM Bob McElrath wrote:
> 
> Have you seen my axiom/tiddlywiki demo?
>     http://bob.mcelrath.org/moz-axiom.tar.gz
> ...

Yes. I agree that the client-side wiki concept has a great deal of
merit.

> 
> Whether or not you like tiddlywiki, I think the web browser as
> an interface is extremely powerful, due to firefox's knowledge
> of MathML, and straightforward UI interaction that can be done
> with css, javascript, and AJAX.  This nicely abstracts the
> interface from the axiom server.

The Sage NoteBook of course uses these methods and communicates
with Sage running a web server embedded in Python. I expect that
what Tom is suggesting would require a similar interface to Axiom.

> 
> What ever happened with embedding a web server in axiom a la
> axiomui?

AxiomUI

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/AxiomUI

uses a separate webserver called 'araneida' written in common lisp
that runs in as a process separate from Axiom and communicates
with Axiom via two-way-stream: See:

http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/axiom--GUI--1/src/web-gui/AxiomHubLisp

With a little help from those-more-knowledgeable-in-Lisp-than-I,
It should be possible to resurrect at least this part of AxiomUI.

> If someone can point me to a build of axiom which contains a 
> web server, I can whip up the equivalent to the above using a
> newer axiom and TiddlyWiki version, where the interface would
> use AJAX to communicate with the axiom server.  This would all
> be local, no web hosting needed. (I'd very much like to do this...
> but have been unable to find the axiomui code, and just building
> it would cost me a week of pain...)

I am very encouraged that you are motivated to continue this
work. For the AxiomUI source code see the links above, but if
you haven't used Lisp before, you might be right about the
"week of pain". :-) I hope we can attract some Lisp helpers...

Camm Maguire also provided some very simple web server code in
Lisp that can be run from inside Axiom:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2005-04/msg00141.html

Kai Kaminski did not use this approach for AxiomUI because it
required a version 2.6.7 of GCL that was not yet in common use
in Axiom.

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2005-06/msg00201.ht
ml

Plus he may have had some concerns about the desire to make sure
that calls to Axiom could be made "non-blocking", e.g. in the case
that Axiom goes into a loop or extremely long calculation. But if
you would like to attempt something this way, I would be glad to
help you get started. I did go so far as to verify that this
mini-webserver in Lisp does work. To complete the interface to
Axiom, we also need to be able to issue Axiom commands from Lisp
and to return Axiom output as a string to be parsed in a manner
similar to what is done in AxiomHubLisp above. Tim Daly provided
some key code in Axiom/Lisp for doing this about the same time as
the start of the AxiomUI project. I think this is in the axiom-
developer email list archives. If you want, I can take a look for
it.

> 
> I've tried various ideas using netcat, and similar tools to 
> pipe command line interfaces over HTTP, but to no success
> (so far).  But, perhaps it can still be done...
> 

I definitely would not want to go that route.

Regards,
Bill Page.