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Is Wolfram Demonstration Project functioning?

Posted 9 years ago

I periodically check the Wolfram Demonstration Project for new demonstrations.

I find this project very useful to explore the possible applications of the Wolfram Language (or of Mathematica desktop notebooks converted to CDFs) by users that may have a different perspective than mine, different ideas and a different language coding style.

Since it's also possible to download the notebook of the demonstration (and have a look at the code) this has been a very handy tool for me to learn (from others) how to realize different kind of interactive simulations, even the more complex ones.

Anyway I notice that in the last couple of months there were very few new simulation uploaded. If you check the latest demonstrations uploaded at this page you'll see that there are just a handful of new demonstrations uploaded in the last month, amongst many updates of older demonstrations. I remember that in the past there were much more new and fresh demonstrations uploaded each week. The total number of demonstrations uploaded till today is reported to be 10044 and since the project started in June 2007 the average should be around 24 new demonstration per week (more or less).

I also submitted a new demonstration on 2015-02-06 about A Pedestrian Interaction Anticipatory Model (a rather complex one, I worked on it for a couple of months) but it hasn't been published yet and I didn't receive any feedback about it being rejected (anyway the demonstration is available at my site www.lucamoroni.it, at this page).

I've also found this interesting recent post in the Wolfram Blog. At the end of the post there's this sentence:

Because browser plugins won’t be around forever, we’re also working on transitioning Demonstrations into CDFs that run in the cloud with HTML5, no plugin required. Last year we released two extraordinary cloud environments for programming that are making this possible: Mathematica Online and Wolfram Programming Cloud.

It would be great to have my students simply access my demonstrations with their browser (and HTML5) and without having to download a 500 MB plugin (the size of the new CDF Player 10), but I haven't found yet the practical way to make it possible.

Above sentence also seems suggesting that Wolfram might be considering about to quit the CDF deploying system for other alternatives. That could be good if the deployment remains easy and free for the users of the demonstrations.

Or maybe the current pause in publishing new demonstrations is just due to technical problems with the transition from CDF Player 9 to CDF Player 10.

Does anyone have some more information about what's going on behind the curtains?

POSTED BY: Luca M
2 Replies

Also, in case there is any confusion about it, CDF itself is here to stay, we're simply anticipating the web-plugin aspect becoming obsolete as browsers begin to drop NPAPI support.

POSTED BY: Andre Kuzniarek

As our recent blog post indicates, the Demonstration site is alive and well. I can't speak to the particulars of the demonstration you submitted, but have asked our team to investigate and comment. And yes, we had some behind-the-scenes infrastructure updates to handle for the V10 transition which did slow down our processing of submissions for a while. The blog post does also allude to our goal of making demonstrations function in the Wolfram Cloud. More details on this will be coming later.

POSTED BY: Andre Kuzniarek
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