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