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Re: Mathematica Programming

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg108975] Re: Mathematica Programming
• From: János Löbb <janos.lobb at yale.edu>
• Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2010 08:05:05 -0400 (EDT)

On Apr 7, 2010, at 7:25 AM, David Bailey wrote:

> 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

My newbie understanding is that with WebMathematica, you can generate 
a webapplication that runs on Tomcat or any other servlet container 
and uses Mathematica as the computational engine.

J=E1nos