Maple Information

Maple is a product of Maplesoft and the current version (released in June 2005) is Maple 10.  (Free minor upgrades are available from Maplesoft.)   Since version 9, Maple has provided two user interfaces (to the same underlying kernel and libraries): the new "Standard Worksheet" interface is implemented in Java; the "Classic Worksheet" interface is implemented in C.  There are also two worksheet formats: the new "Standard Worksheet" format uses XML and is distinguished by the filename extension ".mw"; the "Classic Worksheet" format is proprietary and is distinguished by the filename extension ".mws".  It makes sense to use the "Standard Worksheet" ".mw" format with the "Standard Worksheet" interface and the "Classic Worksheet" ".mws" format with the "Classic Worksheet" interface, although both interfaces support both formats to a limited extent.

However, unless you are using a very powerful computer, I strongly recommend the "Classic Worksheet" interface and ".mws" format.  They also have the advantage of being reasonably compatible with earlier versions of Maple, whereas the XML ".mw" format is definitely not!   Classic (.mws) worksheets that I make available for my courses should work with any fairly recent version of Maple, but beware that standard (.mw) worksheets will probably open correctly only in Maple 10.01 or later, because I use standard (.mw) worksheet format specifically to take advantage of new facilities introduced in Maple 10!

It is probably safest to download Maple worksheet files explicitly and then open them locally from within the appropriate version of Maple.  In principle, it should be possible to open them directly from the web, which is most likely to work if you use Microsoft Internet Explorer as your web browser, since other browsers will probably require tricky non-standard manual configuration.  [To do this, you need to know that my web server, centaur, exports MWS files with content type application/x-maple, so browsers should be configured to use Maple as the application to open documents with that content type.  Note that this applies only to centaur; other servers may use other content types or none at all since there appears to be no standard content type for Maple worksheets.]

Adept Scientific (the main UK Maple distributor) hosts some useful online services:

• the Maple Student Centre, which provides free tutorials on both Maple itself and its applications to mathematics and physics;
• Maple 10 Student Edition.