My previous blog entry was a real success.

Even though my original idea about multi-part MIME has not gotten anywhere, I do now have a concise way to package a maplet with supplemental files in a single package that can be downloaded via the WWW and automatically extracted and executed.

Most of the ideas were presented by acer.

acer first suggested that I look at the interactive interface to the InstallerBuilder. The idea here was to embed the maplet in a worksheet saved in a help database (hdb).

This did work, but was not suitable for actual use due to the overhead of the installer. In the attempt to reduce this overhead, acer then supplied some code that used march and LibraryTools.

To test the product of this interaction, download the file at the URL http://www.math.sc.edu/~meade/TEST/SimpleTest.mla.

If your browser is configured to open .mla files with Maple, the Maple UI will open and a single command will be executed:

march('open', ...);

(you might have to respond to a popup asking for approval to execute the autoexecute code)

My only complaint about this is that the appearance of the worksheet is a distraction. During my calculus lecture this morning it dawned on me that I might be able to get around this by having the .mla file handled by the Maplet Reader (basically a command-line Maple, as I understand it). This works wonderfully. Change the file association to mapletviewer (also in the bin, or bin.win, directory) and the maplet -- with the supplemental image -- appears exactly as if a .maplet file had been downloaded.