mmm, parabolic.

June 23, 2006 9:22 PM

AJAX graphing calculator with a google-earth style interface.
posted by delmoi (25 comments total)

um, perhaps it's just me.

but a *server side* graphing calculator seems the height of stupidity! You, the user, have a general purpose computer that can perform hundreds of millions of calculations a second -- why not use that rather than forcing hundreds, thousands or millions of users to share the same central computer.

(Specifically, the site is monster slow for me...)
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:29 PM on June 23, 2006

I put in x^15 and I think I broke it.
posted by smackfu at 9:47 PM on June 23, 2006

but a *server side* graphing calculator seems the height of stupidity! You, the user, have a general purpose computer that can perform hundreds of millions of calculations a second

It doesn't seem to slow for me. I just thought it was interesting. Although yes, quite redundant. Most of this "Web 2.0" ajax stuff is horribly redundant and foolish, and amounts to basically hacking HTML to do basic interactive interfaces that computers have been able to do for decades.
posted by delmoi at 10:15 PM on June 23, 2006

Also dosn't have a list of operators.
posted by delmoi at 10:16 PM on June 23, 2006

Conjecture: The smallest positive integer n for which xⁿ breaks the grapher is 9.
posted by iconjack at 10:17 PM on June 23, 2006

Also dosn't have a list of operators.

Yes, it does.
posted by cerebus19 at 10:23 PM on June 23, 2006

i just put in x^3434 and it was fine.
posted by casconed at 11:25 PM on June 23, 2006

really cool, but a transparent gif with just the axii (?) would be really tiny and wouldn't have to be re downloaded... also, rendering a 800x800 chunk of the graph would also be rediculously small with gif compression and wouldn't necessitate downloading 12 new images every time you move the graph. There's lots of ways this could be improved.

i mean, hell, why not just absolutely position 1px elements to draw the graph client side?
posted by Tryptophan-5ht at 11:45 PM on June 23, 2006

Whew! Just in time! The battery on my TI-85 just died.
posted by sourwookie at 12:17 AM on June 24, 2006 [1 favorite]

Maybe new browsers can have a javascript bitmapping engine :P
posted by delmoi at 12:20 AM on June 24, 2006

Indeed, why not just use SVG, since as I understand it every browser worth mentioning supports it. People looking for "Web 2.0 Graphing Calculators" aren't going to be using Netscape 3.
posted by Jimbob at 1:27 AM on June 24, 2006

(For instance)
posted by Jimbob at 1:32 AM on June 24, 2006

jimbob: that shows me a bunch of XML in ie 6. I assume it's suppoed to actually render something?
posted by aubilenon at 2:57 AM on June 24, 2006

Sorry, I didn't include IE 6 in my list of "any browser worth mentioning".
posted by Jimbob at 4:04 AM on June 24, 2006

Sorry, I didn't include IE 6 in my list of "any browser worth mentioning".

Anyone does?
posted by cardoso at 4:46 AM on June 24, 2006

jimbob - wow, I really wasn't expecting to get preached at by an AJAX demo...
posted by russm at 5:24 AM on June 24, 2006

It's also pretty useless for calculus
posted by elpapacito at 5:38 AM on June 24, 2006

Wow. A single link to a pedestrian application. Must be n00b. Sure hope delmoi doesn't see this, he'll tear them a new one.
posted by RussHy at 5:54 AM on June 24, 2006

www.graphcalc.com has a pretty nice free download, and fits on a floppy.
posted by Brian B. at 9:31 AM on June 24, 2006

This isn't AJAX - it's not asynchronous, and there's no XML or XML-like client-to-server communication going on. It's just Javascript's Math object (so the calculations are performed on the client, not the server), a bit of DHTML, and GD (or similar) rendering the graph as a gif.

I wish people would stop calling any old bit of Javascript AJAX.
posted by influx at 9:54 AM on June 24, 2006

Oh, I missed the gmaps tileserver type stuff. I am an idiot.
posted by influx at 9:55 AM on June 24, 2006

The Apple Graphing Calculator Story
posted by neuron at 3:22 PM on June 24, 2006

Isn't this exactly the sort of thing a Java Applet or Flash would be perfect for?
posted by spazzm at 6:18 PM on June 24, 2006

For example.
posted by spazzm at 6:22 PM on June 24, 2006

Conjecture: The grapher breaks for xⁿ for all n >= 9 and mod(n,2)=1.
posted by spazzm at 8:39 PM on June 24, 2006