On Aug 7, 2007, at 11:17 PM, William Stein wrote: > The suggestion to make a serious major push for good 3d graphics, is > clearly difficult but totally doable. I think this would be the best > investment of time at present for the greatest return. > The lack of good integrated interactive 3d graphics in SAGE is now the > main remaining missing functionality. I still think the best solution > is a java applet in the notebook and vtk/mayavi for > people using the command line.
Good interactive 3d graphics (in the notebook (and also from the command line if Java is installed)) is not as far off as one might think. There's still hard work left to do, but we've got a good plan and a fair amount of code written and I've been planning to start working on it again next week. I still think vtk/mayavi will probably be necessary for visualizing very large data sets. As well as being useful in its own right, I agree with the sentiments that fancy, flashy 3d graphics are a great way to get SAGE noticed. > Aaron's suggestion to make it really easy to run the SAGE notebook > publicly through apachessl sort of scares me because running the > SAGE notebook publicly in anything but a chroot jail is inviting > disaster, and that will never change. This is definitely not > ready for anybody to trivially do, and probably it should never > be. Notice that there are -- as far as I can tell -- no web pages > (besides the SAGE notebook) that let a person enter arbitrary Python > code, and Python is vastly more popular than SAGE. (Also, running > the notebook through apache is already reasonably easy via using mod > proxy.) I think a public SAGE notebook is the best and lowest entry point for people trying out SAGE. Unfortunately I think recently this has taken a big step back with requiring signing up to try it out and (though it may not seem like a big deal to some people but can be very scary to those that aren't so computer-savvy) the warnings browsers put up about the apparent insecurity of the self-signed certificate (since every page now uses ssh). I personally would like to see a no- commitment open public notebook again, even if it had limitations (e.g. a short max runtime and non-persistent worksheets, with the explanation that these are security/resource constraints, and one can log in and/or download sage for free). - Robert --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] 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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
