All about Rails

Carsten and I recently launched TexHub which is a little service for serving up latex equations as images. It’s pretty simple, just Base64 + URI encode latex string and append it to a URL. It’s extracted from our math equations feature on Learnhub

For example:

e=MC²

A more complex example: F(x) = \\int_{-\\infty}{a} f(t)dt + \\int_{a}^{x} f(t)dt

We haven’t done much with the front end yet as we’ll primarily be using it as a service, so the focus has been on speed. I wrote the web interface using Sinatra which turned out to be perfect for this sort of app. I plan on writing more micro apps in the future with Sinatra, perhaps the next thing will be the Ruby version of Tilomino which has been sitting untouched for two years….