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Sage Tasks Outline

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 and sagenb/todo.txt, but the scope here is wider. Feel free to make changes. To keep items succinct, please make links to group discussions, etc.

1. General

• Sagenb.org privacy policy.

• Y. Aner's notebook threat model (PDF).

• SageForge - semi-automated repository for contributions to Sage:

  • 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

• Tests:
  • Meaningful statistics / benchmarks, e.g., %timeit for individual doctests.

• Buildbot.

• Parallel inter/intra-spkg builds.
• Windows port.
• Fat binaries (no SSE3, etc.).
• Notebook functional tests - Extend Selenium tests to other browsers.

• Notebook load tests - The Grinder, FunkLoad, Pylot, Watir, Zope.testbrowser (now in SageNB).

3. Development

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

• More convenient development workflow:

  • Code review tools - Rietveld.

  • Automated, continuous builds and testing for new patches.

• Static Python code analysis, pep8.

4. Documentation

• Document:
  • Add many more modules to the reference manual.

  • pexpect interface for users.

  • notebook port forwarding.

  • Notebook server technical overview.

  • Run notebook server as daemon.

5. Notebook

5.1. Admin

• Don't list all users' worksheets.

• Authentication - abstract interface:
  • LDAP.
  • UNIX accounts.
• Dashboard:
  • Real-time and cumulative statistics, aggregate and per user.
  • Backups: complete or selective.
  • Manage user accounts, passwords, groups, privileges.
  • Send email to all registered users.
  • Install new / updated modules and spkgs.
• More powerful account management tools.
• Allow email address as username.

• Custom analytics tags, geolocation (ClustrMaps).

5.2. Introspection

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

• Completions link for mobiles.

• Live introspection cells.
• Introspection cross-links.

• New documentation browser. Open worksheet docstrings in this browser.

5.3. "Modes"

• %timeit.

• %cython mode, full and outside sage.

• Slideshow mode - #6342.

• interacts:
  • Auto updates.

  • Live published or remote - #6855.

  • Widget layout - #7379.

  • Examples to include with Sage.

  • Free-form workspace with pipelines.

  • More widgets: circular slider ("angle" wheel), date picker, vertical sliders, spreadsheets, interactive plots, etc.

  • New architecture.

• LaTeX doc mode.

• reST mode, with server-side Sphinxify.

• Chat - qwebirc, Web IRC.

• Debugging:
  • Prettier tracebacks for %modes.

  • Python debugger a la Pylons - #7509.

• Draw or annotate with vector graphics - #6973.

• Code editor - BeSpin, CodeMirror (#7501).

• Browse worksheet directories like a file system.

• Math input GUI plug-ins.

5.4. Under the hood

• Manage Jmol applet count / memory use - sage-notebook.

• Use Python's logging facility.

• Cythonize pexpect.
• Load-balancing.
• Offload more work to worksheet processes, e.g., docbrowser generation.

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

• Client-server and server-server interaction:

  • Load JS / CSS components on demand - Ajile.

  • Server-to-server backups, possibly with authentication.
• Decouple secure transport from sage. Use OpenSSL(?)

• 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.

• 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. 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.