This gives a little bit of history in the WebCAS project as well as my background in designing mathematical tools on the web.

I helped design a system of mathematical plotters written in Java at the University of Colorado at Boulder, called the Mathematical Visualization Toolkit. I helped write many of the underlying code for the MVT, and the basic mathematical object structure is similar in both.

With the release of Firefox 1.5, a major browser integrated MathML, an xml-based storage of mathematical content. See the World Wide Web Consortium for more details on MathML and the Mozilla MathML website for more information about MathML in the Firefox browser.

In the winter of 2010 (and 2011) I altered the code to expand the number of browsers that would work with WebCAS. Technically, instead of relying on MathML and SVG (both of which only are only supported by Firefox), I have moved to using MathJAX which renders mathematics written in LaTeX using web fonts and javascript. Instead of SVG, which is only supported by Firefox, I have used the canvas element, which is now supported by all major browsers (including IE, amazingly).

I am not trying to recreate Mathematica, Maple or Matlab (or Sage, my current favorite CAS). These are all wonderful tools that I have used at different times in my career. They are great at being all-purpose tools for solving a large diversity of mathematical problems. WebCAS is a teaching tool, and at their heart, none of these software packages are teaching tools.