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From: Nicholas Chung on 6 Apr 2010 07:24
I have Mathematica 7 but I was wondering how it compares to
WebMathematica and WorkBench? Can I create full applications and
interactive websites with Mathematica? How much control do I have over
the user interface design?

From: David Bailey on 7 Apr 2010 03:20
Nicholas Chung wrote:
> I have Mathematica 7 but I was wondering how it compares to
> WebMathematica and WorkBench? Can I create full applications and
> interactive websites with Mathematica? How much control do I have over
> the user interface design?
>
You can certainly create full applications - the WorkBench can help with
some tasks, such as debugging and project organisation, but it is not
required to access Mathematica's functionality. You can also export a
variety of still and moving images, which are ideal for putting on a
website. For a fully interactive websites you would need WebMathematica.

David Bailey
http://www.dbaileyconsultancy.co.uk

From: David Park on 7 Apr 2010 03:21
Very interesting question.

I have never been able to understand the promotional material for
webMathematica. Can one run webMathematica from a standard user web site
provided by an ISP? Or does one have to have one's own server setup, and
what would that consist of? Where would the Mathematica engine that drives
webMathematica actually reside? (It would be nice to have an answer that I
could operationally understand and not in some jargon.) Is webMathematica
something accessible for ordinary Mathematica users and developers, or is it
ultimately a high priced institutional type application? Is it available to
Premier subscribers?

If I recollect correctly, there is a possibility that in the near future WRI
will provide a way so that anyone can read a Mathematica notebook on line in
a web browser. Would this include the use of active controls and be able to
utilize private packages? Would this be an alternative to webMathematica?

Lots of questions, but being able to communicate efficiently with people who
don't presently have Mathematica is still the missing link.


David Park
djmpark(a)comcast.net
http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/



From: Nicholas Chung [mailto:nchung66(a)u.washington.edu]

I have Mathematica 7 but I was wondering how it compares to
WebMathematica and WorkBench? Can I create full applications and
interactive websites with Mathematica? How much control do I have over
the user interface design?



From: Arturas Acus on 7 Apr 2010 07:25

Dear David,

we use webMma several years. Short explanations running linux OS from my
expierence below.

On Wed, 7 Apr 2010, David Park wrote:

> Very interesting question.
>
> I have never been able to understand the promotional material for
> webMathematica. Can one run webMathematica from a standard user web site
> provided by an ISP?

To run webMma you have to sign special agreement with Wolfram and
register server in their data base.


Or does one have to have one's own server setup, and
> what would that consist of?
We use our own web server running separate linux machine. In addition to
web server (apache in our case) webMma requires tomcat server. And if You
want not just Mathematica kernel functionality, but also to display Mathematica
generated graphics, then xvnc server is also needed (we use tightvnc).


Where would the Mathematica engine that drives
> webMathematica actually reside? (It would be nice to have an answer that I
> could operationally understand and not in some jargon.)
Mathematica is installed in usual unix way for some user. You can
imagine webMma as an java script collection, which accepts web inquiries,
then cals Mathematica kernel (which in turn cals Mathematica front end to generate
graphics) and then puts Mathematica generated rezults back. As I mentioned tomcat
server plays central part here. webMathematica scripts provides call
security check as well as limits for allowed kernel computation time,
memory
size, kernel number, restart times, etc...



Is webMathematica
> something accessible for ordinary Mathematica users and developers, or is it
> ultimately a high priced institutional type application?

High priced application

Is it available to
> Premier subscribers?
>
> If I recollect correctly, there is a possibility that in the near future WRI
> will provide a way so that anyone can read a Mathematica notebook on line in
> a web browser. Would this include the use of active controls and be able to
> utilize private packages? Would this be an alternative to webMathematica?
>
> Lots of questions, but being able to communicate efficiently with people who
> don't presently have Mathematica is still the missing link.
>
>
> David Park
> djmpark(a)comcast.net
> http://home.comcast.net/~djmpark/
>
>
>
> From: Nicholas Chung [mailto:nchung66(a)u.washington.edu]
>
> I have Mathematica 7 but I was wondering how it compares to
> WebMathematica and WorkBench? Can I create full applications and
> interactive websites with Mathematica? How much control do I have over
> the user interface design?
>
>
>
>

From: David Bailey on 7 Apr 2010 07:25
David Park wrote:
> Very interesting question.
>
> I have never been able to understand the promotional material for
> webMathematica. Can one run webMathematica from a standard user web site
> provided by an ISP? Or does one have to have one's own server setup, and
> what would that consist of? Where would the Mathematica engine that drives
> webMathematica actually reside? (It would be nice to have an answer that I
> could operationally understand and not in some jargon.) Is webMathematica
> something accessible for ordinary Mathematica users and developers, or is it
> ultimately a high priced institutional type application? Is it available to
> Premier subscribers?
>

My thoughts exactly! I do wish that when WRI add a piece of extra
software meant to augment basic Mathematica in some way, they asked
themselves some basic questions:

1) What new capabilities will this add to Mathematica?

2) Is the software an add-on, or a different version of Mathematica?

3) If it could potentially expose a lot of Mathematica functionality to
people who have not purchased Mathematica, how will this be prevented.

4) Does it solve a problem that is not already solvable in a
satisfactory way?

Ideally they would ask themselves these questions before embarking on
the project, and they would then supply answers these questions in
promotional material describing the product!

For example, with GUIKit, I never knew whether this software was
designed to hide the underlying Java, or repackage it in some way. I
knew you could (optionally) use it to create widgets in XML format, but
I never knew why this would be useful (given that the XML code would
only work in conjunction with Mathematica!), etc.

I also wish that WRI would keep new jargon to an absolute minimum.
Explanations in terms of jargon that is not itself defined is not worth
very much!

David Bailey
http://www.dbaileyconsultancy.co.uk

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