As I have not bought a Christmas gift for my brother yet and he doesn't seem want anything special I going to try to make a (web) App to amuse him.<p>It's a Machine Learning 'Art' project thought up in a hurry.<p>I need some quick recommendations for libraries and frameworks to make this work in the short time available.<p>For the ML code Im going to use octave as that is my experience with ML.<p>Now I want the ML code to output a file for the client side to view, more concretely its going to be either a 2D (or possibly a 3D) like model that's is going to be rendered in 3D to the user.<p>First I thought about doing the client side in Java(or Scala), but Its seems I could do it directly in the browser using WebGL, although I haven't used it at all (I have used OpenGl in java) and my JavaScript experience is much less than my Java one.<p>Anyhow I also need some server code to glue together the client code to the ML code and to serve the website, here my experience is almost none, I have some basic PHP experience, but I have never done anything that interfaces with a program on the server, so I don't really know what software I need.<p>Basically all I need is to call a octave script with arguments based on client side (browser) interaction and then get the resulting 3D model or image into my WebGL code for the user to view.<p>My biggest knowledge gap is the server side software.<p>Do I need a framework like Play! or Ruby on Rails or are they overkill, I have zero experience using them.
Like I said I only have little experience with writing PHP with a db, I haven't actually interfaced a program with server code before so I want the solution with smallest and simples learning curve.<p>So are my assumptions that WebGL is the way forward correct (I only need to render textured surfaces)<p>And what software stack is needed to interface my ML code to client code.<p>I know Java, Scala, Octave, Javascript, Python, PHP (in order of experience)