We wanted wiki to be able to compute. These plugins developed our notion of cooperating computational engines.
Exploring
We started with the notion of a calculating markup that we had invented for the sole purpose of working out expenses. We converted this from awk to javascript and saw it work. See About Calculator Plugin
We wanted to see how data could move between pages and even those pages that were not yet visible on the server. We built calculator that summed repeated queries to a metabolic dataset. See About Metabolism Plugin
Deploying
We developed the more general calculator that get and set values by name. Later this was extended to include unit calculations. See About Method Plugin
We showed how we could assemble a dataset from a large collection of pages, each with a variety of methods. See About Rollup Plugin
We showed how we could recompute a calculation spread across many pages at interactive speeds. This included the ability to translate the calculation to spreadsheet formulas. See About Reduce Plugin