``What is the need for a web based fitting program?''
Over the years I realised as a Physics teacher and experimental physics researcher that the possibility to perform data analysis and function fitting, including report writing, over the Internet using a web browser would help me a lot on my everyday activities.
As a teacher I feel that it would be great to have a system that I could use to explain the procedures of non-linear numerical function fitting using the least-square minimization method and that the students could use without licence restrictions and operating system limitations.
As an experimental physics researcher I have collaborations with colleagues in different countries and I lack the possibility of using a common software that we can all use without the bonds imposed by software licences and operating systems flavors.
In 1993 after my thesis I was using a software package written in C and PERL using the minimization routine MINUIT from the CERN library [1]. This package was running first on Unix and later on Linux.
After several ports of this package to different flavors of Linux, live Linux CDs, to CygWin, and to Linux virtual machine guests running on Windows hosts I came to the conclusion that the best would be concentrate the development of this package on a single operating system and provide a web interface to operate with it.