INTRODUCTION



  1. This project was conceived in the summer of 2000 at the Center for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

  2. Dr. Konrad Polthier was visiting the CECM to demonstrate Javaview at the Live Collaborative Mathematics Conference at SFU that same summer.

  3. I was on an undergraduate research assistantship looking for something interesting to get involved in, and was rather impressed with JavaView's efforts to put 3D geometries on the traditionally 2D internet.

  4. The two of us were introduced by the director of the CECM, Dr. Johnathan Borwein, who suggested we investigate ways in which to couple Maple with JavaView. At first this did not seem to be a straight forward endeavor considering that Maple does not provide apis or external interfaces.

  5. As much Maple development is done at the CECM, resident Maple gurus were able to show us how to coerce Maple into exposing the nested list data structures that make up its objects. From here we were able to deduce the format of Maple Plot objects, parse them and export them in a format JavaView would be able to recognize.

  6. The proof of concept was completed by the end of August, and a functional Maple package followed suit a couple of months later. This package became known as JavaViewLib 0.00.

  7. Since then, pastime efforts have been made to mature the JavaViewLib into a more stable, platform independent, usable package. Here i'll be demonstrating the recently completed third version JVL0.02 - an easy to use tool for the interchange of geometries between Maple and the web.