Linkable scientific graph webapp

Question

This is a typical scientific graph webapp:

Enter your function, set the options, and the graph appears.

Unfortunately, all I have tried are not sharable. If you want to share a graph with colleagues, you have to send them a link and say exactly what should be inserted in what field. It is much easier to take a screenshot, but then the colleagues can't easily work with the graph.

I am looking for a graph webapp that can be shared.

All details should be encoded in the URL, for instance:

http://graph.example.com/f(x)=1+263907/(x+117)&range=-5;5000;-5;3100&grid=true

or something similar. Must work on all modern browsers.

• Bonus if a "short URL" checkbox is available as well
• Bonus if there is an intuitive "forking" system à la Github

Answer 1

Wolfram Alpha does the main part of what you want:

• it was created by the makers of Mathematica, so graphing is not a big deal
• a sample query is http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2B263907%2F%28x%2B117%29 -- if you remove the URL encoding, you see that it is www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+263907/(x+117)
• it does a whole lot more besides graphing equations

As for your bonus points:

• I see no method for forking, but it looks like you can sign in and see a history of your own queries.
• I don't think it'll shorten the URL.

Answer 2

My understanding is that RStudio's Shiny was designed exactly to do what you are wanting to do both for those more serious as well as casual users that just want to play with the parameters to see how items are affected. It uses the R platform.

I did not find an exact full function scientific graphing calculator example someone has already built, but the following example pages have several. In particular the MathJax library for R may help you do exactly what you want.

• RStudio's Gallery of example Shiny Web Applications
• Show Me Shiny Website is a website of user's examples.
• R-Blogger's has a lot more examples
• The tutorial for Shiny as well as R has several packages to provide flexibility to do more once you have it up and running.
• It can be self-hosted or in there or AWS's cloud, you can also share your cloud hosted ones via RPubs.com. There are MANY more examples there as well of what others have done.
• You can also define the parameters and functions in the shared link and what they are allowed to do with it to interactively work with the predefined data set.

Perhaps more effort than you are wanting, but it is the line I am currently pursing myself to do something similar but am not quite there yet to say I have done it myself yet. It looks very promising though.