I am doing some project planning that could use the CDF Player and CDF technology as a means of distributing a mathematical model to reviewers.
However, I’ve noticed that the documentation for 9 is really for 8. There have been some indications that 10 is coming out with no changes to the documentation since version 8. There is no File | New | CDF (Free or Pro) is 9. The latest CDFs in CDF-Examples are from 2012. This raises a red flag that CDFs are no longer mainstream.
Ideally we would like to use a technology that is supported and will stay current with Windows and Apple OS versions.
I see that there is a CDF Export and Preview under the File menu. Some of the questions I will be asked by management are:
Is CDF considered a legacy technology? If not, will it be available in 10 and future versions - is there a roadmap that can be referenced?
If CDF is considered legacy, when do support options expire?
Are there any replacements planned from Wolfram that are functionally equivalent to CDFs? If so what are they?
What are runtime licensing considerations that should be honored if we use C and C++ as a front-end?
CDFs offer an attractive solution - I love what I am seeing in the CDF-Examples - but before committing to CDFs we need to know that this technology is on-going and will stay current with Mathematica and operating systems.
I think that CDF is here to stay for the foreseeable future. The current CDF player is at version 9.01. IN the current version of Mathematica the creation of CDFs has been changed. One creates a notebook and then uses Save As… to choose CDF as the saving form. Then one is working with a CDF. But more importantly are the two menu items in the file Menu which are CDFPreview and CDFExport. These replace the File|New items that you were looking for. And, in effect these item promote CDFs to a higher level of importance. The WolframCloud supports CDFs as well. And Mathematica 10 also has the same CDF menu items described above.
In addition to all of this there is the function family that supports CDFs: CDFDeploy and CDFInformation.
Now that version 10 has been released and it includes new structures like DataSets and Associations, will a new version of CDF Viewer/Player be required to support the new functionality or does the CDFDeploy convert these to something the existing CDF Viewer/Player understands?
Someone from WRI should comment… but generally I believe that the CDF player has to be updated to a new version to support the new functionalities of Mathematica 10. The CDF payer is, in effect, a restricted version of Mathematica. I do not know if a new update has been posted to the Wolfram website.
Can someone from WRI comment on the timing of the v10 update for the CDF Player? I have much CDF content and need to update it for the approaching Fall semester. If it will be more than a few weeks I will need to stay back on v9 for my Fall updates.
I hope CDF is continued to be supported for v10. I am sending a lot of CDF export files from my notebooks to customers. I had to go back to v9 to enable them to open the CDF files in the free v9 player.
When can we expect a CDF v10 player?
If one looks in the Wolfram CDF Player installation one sees an AddOns/Applications folder. This is very nice because one can add one’s own applications there with packages, stylesheets and an init.m file. This is extremely convenient because you can add your own code in package form to the CDF player. It is quite likely that sophisticated CDF documents would use self-generated packages. You could also include a folder of CDF files for an extended application, zip it all up and a non-Mathematica reader could just unzip it into the player.
It would be nice if the CDF player had a place to search for package applications that was outside the installation - something corresponding to $UserBaseDirectory with Mathematica proper. There is a MathematicaPlayer in my personal folders that seemed to have gotten installed at the same time as the free player but when I tried to move the added package there it didn’t work. Does anybody know if something like that is supposed to work?
In any case, the free CDF player seems to be one of the more promising features for enhancing the value of Mathematica. I hope WRI will keep it and polish it and make it robust, simple and stable because nothing could be a better advertisement for Mathematica proper.
Free CDFs can’t read external files–I assume that applies to user-installed packages. Enterprise CDFs can read external files, though they may need to be Encoded–this was certainly true for the previous Mathematica Player.
The free player will read a package file (it was Encoded) if it’s in the Wolfram CDF Player installation. I tested that.
But WRI is off on the wrong foot again with an Enterprise CDF! There should be no such product! They should use the model of the Adobe Acrobat Reader. You need, say, Professional Acrobat to write PDF files and that’s a few hundred dollars. And it doesn’t have Adobe logos plastered all over the PDF documents. You should only need Mathematica to write the most general CDF documents. I bought the Professional version of Mathematica many years ago and have subscribed to Premier service for updates all these years at a pretty penny - certainly much more than Adobe Acrobat Professional costs. I am rather ticked off that one gets so little for it. It took two years and $900 to get the Version 10 update and I consider it so impaired that for the first time I went back to the previous version.
In technical publishing Mathematica and CDF should blow PDF documents out of the water, but they never will because of their convoluted and inconsiderate attitude toward customers. And also because a typical technical professional has to spend much more time solving gratuitous Mathematica problems then he does solving his technical problems.
David,
Thanks for the candid posting. CDF seems to have a lot of potential and I was considering using it as a base for a technical information product but, between your post and the number of posts about problems with version 10, maybe it is too soon. Mathematica as a platform is a very ambitious project so maybe it’s understandable that it will take a while to iron out the incompatibilities. I’m very curious to see what WRI does with version 10 of the CDF player and how long it takes them to come out with it.
I agree that there should be no “enterprise” product. The capability to produce useful distributable applications should be built into Mathematica.
I recommended this to Wolfram several years ago. I am sure I am not the only one. At that time I was using Mathematica to analyze defectivity for cause in a semiconductor process. The analyses were distributed throughout the engineering organization. I was having to spend time running these analyses on each new set of data.
I recommended that a future version have the capability of producing a distributable stand-alone application that could read data files, make computations, and deliver results. I pointed out that to assume this would reduce license sales would be naive. What would really happen in an engineering environment would be this: As soon as someone began distributing such useful applications, the engineers receiving them would want the capability of making their own. It would trigger an expansion of Mathematica use throughout the organization. Unfortunately, reserving this capability to a much more costly enterprise tool will probably defeat the purpose.
This is by no means the first time I have advocated WRI for better service to the engineering disciplines. And I see some hope now, especially in areas like control theory, where they seem to be trying. But that other tool – in my opinion a much inferior tool – has made such early inroads that it dominates the engineering market.
It occurs frequently that I cannot send a CDF to a correspondent because I use version10. It is not always possible to revert to v9 I am e.g. in a discussion about 3D space curves and am using the new FrenetSerretSystem to prove my point. Unfortunately, I have to use a PDF to explain my point! It would be nice publicity for WRI if others could see all the new wonderful functions v10 has plenty of!
I also can no longer upload demonstrations made in v10. In some cases, I convert the code to v9 but this becomes increasingly difficult and pointless.
I am afraid (and hope to be wrong) that WRI will no longer support CDF nor the demonstrations site and replace both with one of their many new cloud products?
It would be helpful if somebody from WRI could clarify this.
At the WTC in October there were rumors that a Wolfram Player(Pro)10 (only one executable!) will be built (at least beta-wise) this month. PlayerPro is not abandoned and to my mind still one of the best actually nicely working products of Wolfram Research Inc.
The player pro appears to currently cost £130. UK
Therefore it will not be much use who just want to distribute concept illustrations in education.
Please may we have a version 10 of the systems that were in place before?
Also: See David Keith’s comments above (which I think are so sensible…)
As I understood Andre Kuzniarek in his talk (What's New in CDF -- from Wolfram Library Archive) he mentioned that there still will be the free player, of course, but the player and the playerpro executables are the same, i.e.: if you buy playerpro you can change the free player to playerpro by password. that announcement was applauded by the audience.