MaplePrimes - answers and comments on Question, MapleCloud has an open API?

No API right now

AndrewS — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 17:45:20 Z

There's no public API for the MapleCloud Document Exchange at the moment. Do you have a particular application in mind or capability that you'd like to see implemented? Perhaps it's something that we could consider for a future version of Maple.

cooperative authoring

pagan — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 18:26:47 Z

Thanks for replying, Andrew. The basic idea is that someone other than Maplesoft might develop some other useful tool with it, if there were an open API.

One thing that came to mind was the possibility of cooperative authorship of documents. I don't really mean real-time display of each participant's sheet. I mean more in terms of an applet that could show whether participant A's sheet was out-of-sync with B's last upload, and what the diffs were.

The details are not so important, but I could imagine a scheme in which participants each uploaded their copy of the sheet with a slight modification to the parent doc's name, according to a specified convention. Then the applet might periodically compare them and report or allow relevant reaction. The Worksheet, XMLTools, and Sockets packages might be used in the implementation, along with Maplets or Components and perhaps INTERFACE_WORKSHEET().

Of course there could be other interesting ideas from other people.

Does releasing information about how Maple talks to the MapleCloud server necessitate waiting until the next major release of Maple? Or are you suggesting that the mechanism would have to first be changed (for security of other patching), before it could be open knowledge?

@pagan Ensuring that we maintain each

AndrewS — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:30:25 Z

@pagan Ensuring that we maintain each user's privacy as well as the overall security of the server are definitely our primary concerns, but we also need to make sure that the server load is controlled and that we retain some level of flexibility in the API for this very new feature.

Your specific example of tools that facilitate group collaboration on Maple documents (such as tracking the history of how a document has changed) is an excellent one, and something we are thinking about quite a bit as we consider future enhancements to the Document Exchange.