ExpMath (Exploratory Mathematics)

ExpMath is a project of the Institute of Computational Mathematics at the Technical University of Braunschweig. It aims at providing a web application visualizing mathematical ideas to students of the engineering disciplines of the first semesters. The concept is to not provide a more sophisticated alternative to Matlab, Mathematica, Octave, GNUplot etc. but to empower students with the capabilities of visualization even if they not yet have the skills to create the tools themselves.

The ExpMath site consists of two parts:

1. The actual interactive plots are rendered with the help of bokeh, a Python visualization library in combination with some custom extensions.
2. Each interactive plot is framed within static components summarizing the theoretical background and enhancing the user experience with questions.

Usage

Deployment with docker

1. Clone the repository to the production server, and adjust the IP address in website/init.py to the one of the server

2. Make sure docker is installed and the docker daemon is running

3. Use the script to build the docker container

   ./build_on_server.sh

4. Use the script to deploy the server (if necessary stop an old docker container beforehand)

   ./start_on_server.sh

5. Use the script to stop a running server

   ./stop_on_server.sh

Manual deployment on a Ubuntu machine

1. Install the necessary dependencies

   sudo apt update

   sudo apt install apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3 python3 python3-pip

   sudo pip3 install flask fuzzywuzzy virtualenv bokeh holoviews scipy

2. Create the folder structure

   mkdir -p /var/www/expmath/website

   mkdir -p /var/www/expmath/log

   mkdir -p /var/www/expmath/plots

3. Create a virtual environment for the flask application

   virtualenv /var/www/expmath/website/venv

   source /var/www/expmath/website/venv/bin/activate

   pip3 install flask fuzzywuzzy bokeh

   exit

4. Clone the github repository and !! adjust the IP address in website/init.py to the one of the server

   git clone https://github.com/Ceyron/expmath.git ~/expmath

5. Copy the files

   cp -r ~/expmath/plots/* /var/www/expmath/plots/

   cp -r ~/expmath/website/* /var/www/expmath/website/

   cp ~/expmath/deployment/expmath.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/

   cp ~/expmath/deployment/expmath.wsgi /var/www/expmath/

6. Configure Apache

   sudo a2enmod wsgi

   sudo a2ensite expmath

   sudo a2dissite 000-default

   sudo apache2ctl restart

7. Make sure the firewall does not block port 80 and 9001

Embedding in an all static web-app

If you are not using flask, then it is still possible interactive bokeh-plots, i.e. ones that will callback to the bokeh server, by including a script tag as follows

<script
    src="http://[IP]:[PORT]/[PLOT\_NAME]/autoload.js?bokeh-autoload-element&
    bokeh-app-path=/[PLOT\_NAME]&bokeh-absolute-url=http://[IP]:[PORT]/
    [PLOT\_NAME]" id="1000"></script>