[Axiom-developer] RE: Axiom HyperDoc Replacement

[Bill Page]

On April 16, 2007 5:44 AM Martin Rubey wrote:
> 
> I'm a little frustrated with work, so I started to mess 
> around with mangling docstrings.
> 
> unfortunately, Kai is not answering... But maybe you can
> help.

I'll try.

> 
> I need the following (please keep in mind that I know little 
> html, and nearly no javascript, so I really depend on you)

Ok.

> 
> I would like to communicate between a browser and axiom.
> More precisely, I would like to send a single command like
> 
> getHtmlDocumentation("stretch")
> 
> from the browser to axiom, and present the result in the 
> browser, maybe in a separate frame, but that's probably a
> detail. The result will be a (long) string containing html code,
> like:
> ...
> (possibly I can modify tex4ht output a little in order to make
> it more concise...)
> 
> I know of the email 
> 
> http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2005-04/msg00141.html
> but it looks rather complicated at the moment.

Running the web server code written in Lisp or Boot inside
Axiom is certainly a possibility. For ideal results we would
need someone (like Kai) who is sufficiently fluent in Lisp.
The interface with the rest of Axiom is quite simple using
some other details provided in an email form Tim Daly about
the same time.

I would rather like to work this one out in detail but I
would require some fairly direct help with the Lisp coding.

> Moreover, it is absolutely necessary that it runs on Windows.

Aw, the hard part ... ;-)

Another alternative would be to write a script in Python or
Perl which prepares the input from the browser, starts
Axiom, runs the input, collects the output and sends it to
the browser. This could either be a stand alone script that
includes built-in web server support or it could be written
as a cgi script to be called from a webserver such as apache.

The latter method is essentially the method used by the
MathAction interface on the Axiom wiki. I recall that there
is a small problem with the way Python starts AXIOMsys that
prevents this from running easily under Windows (since "pipe"
support on Windows is very different than Linux), but I think
this could be solved - which would also be interesting since
it would then permit us to run MathAction on Windows as one
option for user interface to Axiom with browser support
similar to hyperdoc. (This is possible now under linux).

Regards,
Bill Page.