O’Reilly Creating a Web Version of Mathematica
February 20th, 2008
According to this press release, O’Reilly is partnering with Wolfram Research to create a Web 2.0 version of Mathematica that will “be browser accessible and, utilizing AJAX technologies, will emulate the desktop version of the software with remarkable fidelity”. I’ll be very interested to see how they handle equations (MathML isn’t well supported) and grahpics (IE7 doesn’t do SVG, so what, Flash? Silverlight?).
Isn’t this a bit odd for O’Reilly? Why not support the SAGE project?
If they were using flash or silverlight they wouldn’t have any need for ajax.
What would be great would be if they developed an API like Google Charts http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ where they could do an ajax request for some type of mathematical function or graph and get the result back as a generated image. It would be great because they might one day open it for external developers to play with. (Whereas a flash or silverlight solution isn’t interoperable with anything else.)
For the shrinking number of users of IE: there are many ways of making it do SVG
btw, Silverlight and Flash are vendor lock-in, worse than IE itself
I welcome Mathematica to the big list of important SVG applications: http://svg.startpagina.nl
Matt already mentioned SAGE, check out https://www.sagenb.org/ : that’s a web 2.0 Mathematica-like environment open-source and free to use (that means you get server time) using Python as a language. Neat!