[Axiom-developer] A possiible "navigation" approach for Axiom "crystal"

[Bill Page]

Tim,

When you have a moment take a look at the example

  http://zeck.floop.org.uk/mathis/WikiLiver/withNavigator

I am very impressed with the ability of this user interface

  http://www.touchgraph.com

  http://touchgraph.sourceforge.net/

to present very complex subjects.

For the last several months I have been very interested in
the Zope application development environment

  http://www.zope.org

I have implemented (under contract) a collaborative portal
based on Plone (http://www.plone.org) which includes a Wiki
(interactive web page) component

  http://www.zwiki.org

So I am beginning to understand this environment quite well.
Zope is written in Python

  http://www.python.org

If you haven't yet looked at Python, then I very strongly
recommend that you do. From the point of view of Axiom,
Python looks (almost exactly!) like the Boot sub-language
in which most of Axiom is written. I would even go so far
as to suggest that it might be possible (even quite easy?)
to port most of Axiom to Python. Doing so would have some
very important advantages because of the extensive support
that Python has for current computing environments.

Recently I also became aware of "LaTeXwiki"

  http://zwiki.org/LatexWiki

  http://mcelrath.org/Notes/LatexWiki

see also example at

  http://www.latexwiki.com

Taken together, I have the strong feeling that all of these
"technologies" provide exactly the kind of long term (30 years?)
development environment that is needed for Axiom and for large
scale computer algebra systems in general.

Originally I had been very interested in mathematical document
software with a computer algebra interface such as TeXmacs
(http://www.texmacs.org). This might be a fairly good alternative
to the old Axiom hypertex interface but this does not really
address at all the larger issues that you raised in your email
last December

 http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2003-12/msg00056.html


I would be very interested to get reactions to this (what must
seem rather radical) suggestion.

Regards,
Bill Page.

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Saturday, April 03, 2004 10:51 AM
Subject: [GeneralDiscussion] TouchGraph ZWiki Navigator


I'm currently trying to figure out a good way to package an applet I've
cobbled together from the "TouchGraph":http://www.touchgraph.com/ app and
some ZWiki, oython and HTML hacks.  If anybody's interested, I've published
a working example on
WikiLiver":http://zeck.floop.org.uk/mathis/WikiLiver/withNavigator and I'd
really appreciate any ideas on how I could package it so that others can try
it out on their ZWiki installations.
--
forwarded from
http://zwiki.org/address@hidden