APIs, hooks, servers and realtime integration

[Steve Bennett]

Hi all,

  I'm exploring possibilities for a web-based music creation and manipulation tool, and considering LilyPond for rendering the music (is there an alternative? :)). From what I can see in the documentation, it's designed very much as a command line tool, intended to be driven directly by users. Whereas I'm looking for a way to embed it in a web application, and not pay the overhead of loading libraries, parsing and processing entire scores when only small bits change, etc.

A search of the archives shows that this question comes up periodically in various forms (a LilyPond server? an API? incremental rendering?), going back to 2005 - but I haven't stumbled on anything much beyond proof of concept. There's Wikitex, but MediaWiki isn't much help to me, and the Wikitex repository and mailing lists (as linked from http://wikitex.org/) seem to be offline.

The application will probably be based in Django, so Python hooks would be especially useful. I'd be interested in ways of embedding LilyPond, or running a server that can maintain a bit of state to provide quick response.

Any suggestions? Thoughts? Places to look? Other people to ask? :)

Thanks in advance,

Steve