Sage Projects

This is a general outline of targeted areas, including specific tasks, for improving the usability of Sage. The sources include the Sage Usability Improvements List, but the scope here is wider. Feel free to make changes. To keep items succinct, please make links to group discussions, etc.

1. General

• Make a privacy policy for Sagenb.org.

• Read and make suggestions based on Y. Aner's notebook threat model (PDF).

• SageForge - establish a semi-automated repository for contributions to Sage. These contributions can include

  • Scripts, worksheets, databases, and packages of [nearly] all sizes.
  • Supplementary documentation, including multimedia.
  • Optional reviews and ratings.
  • Live, ulimited cellular paste-bin.
  • RSS feeds.

2. Build / Test

• Make a system for analyzing the performance of doctests. Such a system could be used to do performance regression testing across releases, for example.
• Make an automated system for building Sage on lots of different platforms.
• Make progress on the windows port.
• Enhance the Selenium test suite for the notebook, which tests the notebook code. Extend these tests to other browsers.
• Make a system for building fat binaries (e.g., no SSE3, etc.)

3. Development

• Auto-reload changed modules - paster serve --reload, CherryPy's AutoReload.

• More convenient development workflow:

  • Make a code review tool for Sage. One possibility is Rietveld.

  • Make a system for automatically applying and doctesting every ticket marked "needs review", for example. The system can mark the ticket as "needs work" if the patches don't apply or pass doctests. It would be great if there was an easy way for people to donate computer time to this, say, by running a function that starts the process.

• Run a static code checker on code (maybe even as part of the automated testing mentioned above). See Static Python code analysis or pep8.

4. Documentation

• Add more modules to the reference manual. This involves converting the module to use ReST and adding it to the reference manual file.

• Document and provide examples of the pexpect interface that users can use to interact with remote Sage servers. See http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/msg/35e97a1d1cedfdfd.

• Notebook

  • Document and provide examples of using ssh port forwarding to access a local Sage notebook server through an SSH tunnel. See notebook port forwarding.

  • Document how the notebook works. See Notebook server technical overview.

  • Document how to best run the notebook server as a daemon. See Run notebook server as daemon.

5. Notebook

5.1. Admin

• Make an abstract interface to authentication modules. Several possibilities for new authentication modules include:
  • LDAP.
  • UNIX accounts.

• Make it possible to accumulate and analyze statistics about notebook use. For example, analyze geographic traffic patterns (ClustrMaps)

• Make an easy way for an administrator to backup a notebook or selected notebook accounts.
• Make an option for an administrator to send an email to all registered users.
• Make an easy way for an administrator to install new spkgs.
• Allow email address as username.

5.2. Introspection

• Better error detection, e.g., for Maxima command completion.

• Enhance Sage for use on a mobile phone, especially using a touch interface. For example, you can't insert a text cell since you can't shift-click. Also, you can't do tab-completion (the Touch has no Tab key). See http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/e854336b08d436c6/fb8a62d01475e3eb?#fb8a62d01475e3eb.

• Make documentation have collapsible headings or other ways of browsing that aren't so overwhelming. See New documentation browser.

5.3. "Modes"

• %timeit.

• %cython mode, full and outside sage.

• Fix the slideshow in the notebook. See #6342.

• interacts:

  • Live published or remote - #6855.

  • Make it possible to lay out widgets in a grid or other format - #7379.

  • Make a library of good-quality interact examples in Sage. They'll see more use, and right now, the code in the examples on the wiki gets out of date pretty quickly.

  • Make a worksheet a free-form workspace, where you can just put computations anywhere and link them anyhow. See the discussion on Free-form workspace with pipelines.

  • Make more widgets for interacts. These include

    • circular slider ("angle" wheel)

    • date picker

    • vertical sliders
    • spreadsheet-like tables (there is an input_grid control, but it is pretty primitive)

  • Look the interact architecture here: New architecture. Can we use any improvements from it?

• Make a system for converting worksheets to latex documents. See LaTeX doc mode.

• Have a special text cell mode that understands ReST. The server formats it into html for display.

• Include a chat in the notebook - qwebirc, Web IRC.

• Debugging:
  • Make prettier tracebacks for %modes.

  • Include a python debugger a la Pylons - #7509.

• Make a way to draw or annotate with vector graphics - #6973.

• Include a code editor - BeSpin, CodeMirror (#7501).

• Make a way to input math in a GUI: Math input GUI plug-ins.

  • Possibly the best way to do this is to make the code cells contenteditable divs (or just use an existing javascript editor). This is related to the "include a code editor" item in that if we use a "code editor" for the code cells, we probably automatically have a contenteditable div.

    • http://blog.whatwg.org/the-road-to-html-5-contenteditable

    • http://www.cdolivet.com/index.php?page=editArea

    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript-based_source_code_editors

    • See the bottom of http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror/story.html for a few editors too.

5.4. Under the hood

• Make the notebook manage Jmol applet count / memory use to avoid java out-of-memory errors - sage-notebook.

• Use Python's logging facility to log notebook errors.

• Alternate worksheet process implementations: remote, fork, named pipes, memory-mapped files.

• Make server-to-server sync or backup functionality

• Load javascript or css components on demand - Ajile.

• Remote access Python API - Google Documents List Data API

  • Manipulate, share, up/download, publish worksheets at a given Sage(Forge) server.
• Storage:

  • Fix worksheet.autosave().

  • Always retrieve worksheet content from disk on open.
  • Use a revision control tool (e.g., Mercurial) for undo, history, snapshots, etc.
  • File size limit - auto-delete and warn above threshold.

  • Access a user's data directory securely via the new storage API.

  • Handle permissions better for directories, history, output, conf files, etc.

• Migrate to server / framework: Django, Pylons, Pyjamas, Tornado, etc.:

  • Switch from twisted.web2 to twisted.web.

  • URL routes.

5.5. User Interaction

• Help:
  • Reorganize help page:
    • Search for commands.
    • Linking to similar and related commands.

  • Easy set up of shipped jsMath fonts - MathJax.

  • Automatic tips for keyboard shortcuts, editing features, etc. Opt out.
• Customization:
  • Defaults: typeset, implicit multiplication, 3D viewer, rename "Untitled" worksheets.
  • Function to update worksheet titlebar.
  • Easy backups, selective or complete.
• Keys
  • New shortcuts, e.g., for restart worksheet.

  • Custom shortcuts, e.g., ctrl-bksp to delete previous word, not join cells - #7618.

• Cells:
  • Right-click menu.
  • Auto-updating cells, e.g., interacts.
  • Unify server and client-side resize algorithms.
  • Always show links for long output cells, regardless of length or interruption.

  • Select, delete, (un)group, move multiple cells.

• 2D / 3D plots:

  • JavaScript animations.

  • Pre3d-enabled `canvas3d` viewer.

  • Mouse-over for coordinates - matplotlib.

  • Interactively zoom, pan, annotate - canvas, SVG, Flot, Open Flash Chart.

  • Render the 3d plots to WebGL. Maybe a library listed here will help: http://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/User_Contributions

• Worksheets:
  • Export screen with checkboxes for images, data, etc.

  • Use notebook as IDE for running sage instance - #7501.

  • Drag-and-drop file upload.

  • Don't list "Sage Users" when sharing.

  • Page through worksheet list, not all at once - tablesorter.

  • Toolbar with buttons to interrupt running code, save, attach files, etc.

  • Real-time concurrent editing - #7362.

• Published worksheets:
  • Delete them.
  • RSS feeds.

  • Live cells, e.g, interacts - #6855.

  • Only to selected users or groups.
• Notebook:

  • Tags / labels.

  • Manage logins:

    • View recent account activity. Add last login to user.py.

    • Invalidate other sessions' cookies.

  • Full-text search: SQLalchemy, Whoosh (codenode-devel).

• External:

  • Embed live cells / worksheets - #6855.

  • Wave gadgets and robots.

  • Live published worksheets.

6. Graphics

• Streamlines/Line Integral Convolutions to visualize vector fields.
  • NCAR graphics libraries are GPL? They contain well-tested Fortran streamline libraries

  • http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/streamlines/streamlines.html for a very nice 1996 algorithm for doing aesthetic streamlines. The code on that page says it is public domain, but it isn't (the license says the code can't be sold).

  • http://www.zhanpingliu.org/Research/FlowVis/FlowVis.htm - Survey page on vector field visualization. See his "An Advanced Evenly-Spaced Streamline Placement Algorithm" for the ADVESS algorithm which is quite a bit faster than the current standard(?) of Merbarki's algorithm.

  • http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/~cstony/research/star/ - Survey paper

  • http://www.sagenb.org/home/pub/106/ Some basic integration illustrating calculating a streamline

  • There is a scikit for doing line integral convolutions

7. Numerical

• Port some of the ExpoKit routines to Sage/Cython (or if the author agrees to the license, to scipy).

• Examine the alglib numerical muliprecision linear algebra library and see if we can use it for RealField and ComplexField matrices.

• See if we have a use for fastfunlib, which implements multiprecision evaluation of special functions in a much faster way than mpfr, at the possible cost of a very minor difference in accuracy.

• Review http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/4446 and get MPC into Sage

• See if CRQ has interesting bits we could use in Sage to do numerical integration. See also http://www.lirmm.fr/arith18/slides/fousse-GLQuad.pdf

• Investigate CRLib, which provides a correctly-rounded version of libm using MPFR.

• Implement flexible printing for RR, including making ring-specific flags for defaults which truncate zeros, truncate "extra" digits, give a C printf string, print in scientific notation, etc. When teaching numerical analysis, for example, it's nice to be able to turn truncation off completely. (I'm doing this)

• Make a class for calculating with minifloat numbers with user-specified precision //and// user-specified exponent size. Currently RealField lets us specify the precision, but it does not let us specify the exponent size. Being able to specify the exponent size would be very useful in teaching (i.e., we could exactly model single or double precision numbers), and would be a very good exercise in understanding in-depth how arithmetic of floating point numbers works.

• Implement various types of cubic splines with various boundary conditions. See http://netlib.sandia.gov/pppack and maybe just wrap cubspl or translate it to cython?

8. Abbreviated items

These items were found on this page in the past. They weren't specific enough to understand, though. If someone knows what the item is talking about, please elaborate and put the item back up above.

• Notebook

  • Don't list all users' worksheets.

  • Live introspection cells.
  • Introspection cross-links.
  • Auto updates for interacts.
  • Cythonize pexpect.
  • Load-balancing.
  • Offload more work to worksheet processes, e.g., docbrowser generation.
  • Decouple secure transport from sage. Use OpenSSL(?)
• Parallel inter/intra-spkg builds.