On Jan 10, 2008, at 6:03 PM, Ted Kosan wrote: > Robert wrote: > >> What is unfinished about it? Just because the author had/has more >> plans for it doesn't mean it isn't very useable now (more so, I would >> argue, than a drag-n-drop interface). > > Mouse positioning of the cursor, cut and paste,
OK, these would be nice to have. > multiple fonts, font > resizing, multiple equations on one "sheet" of paper, 2D plotting, 3D > plotting, tabbed panes, etc. Much of this seems completely irrelevant to making an equation editor. > Moving on to DragMath's capabilities: > load and save to disk, multi-language support, export to LaTeX, > MathML, Maple, and Maxima along with the ability to add additional > export formats (like Sage) by editing an XML-based configuration file. Again, with the exception of exporting to Sage (or something easily parsed--but I think parsing LaTeX should be easy enough and it's something we're going to want anyway) this all seems irrelevant to being able to sit down at the browser and easily compose an equation. (And I might be bias in this example because for me, the less I have to use my mouse the better.) > I know what Java can do and I have posted demo code which illustrates > it running in the notebook. Now I want to see what Javascript is > capable of because almost everything GUI-related I have seen which is > written in Javascript seems unfinished to me when compared to Java GUI > stuff. From what I have seen so far, Javascript is simply incapable > of coming anywhere close to what Java can do. If it can, I would love > to see actual running examples like I have been providing :-) I am (perhaps one of the few) in agreement with you that Java is more powerful than Javascript, but since Javascript is much lighter weight, more prevalent, and integrates more closely with the web-page paradigm it often seems the better tool for a web-based interface. Of course for some things (e.g. Jmol, and I think there will be others) Java is clearly the best route. > Going back to the initial post in this thread, the Wiris people > "...ended the discussion by telling us that their web-based interface > is (going to be) much better than ours." I don't think they arrived > at this conclusion by thinking that William and Tom were substandard > programmers (which is obviously not the case). I think they looked at > the Sage notebook and concluded they could have written an equivalent > in Java with something like NetBeans in a day or two. I'm hoping you meant that as a hyperbole--I've worked on my fair share of java projects in my day and writing something as sophisticated as the Java notebook in any language is a significant undertaking. Good GUIs can be written Java, but I've seen a lot of bad ones too. We'll see how it all plays out, but I'm not worried about the route we've taken (and, with you and the Enthought stuff, I won't be surprised if there's a Java interface alternative to Sage someday as well). > Anyway, since I am one of the few Java developers on this list (and > since I was mentioned by name in the original post) I felt it was my > duty to provide arguments for the Java-side of this discussion. I > have done this to my satisfaction :-) > > Ted > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
