webMathematica™ Wolfram - Wolfram Research

webMathematica User Guide 97Underlying Technology and LimitationsThe web version of Manipulate is based on Flash web technology. Flash is commonly used toadd interactive features and effects to websites and is quite well supported over a variety ofdifferent platforms and browsers. webMathematica actually uses Flash 9, so any browser thatdoes not support this will not be able to support webMathematica interactive web tools.MSPManipulate does not support all the features of Manipulate. While it will increase its supportover time, any interactive example that uses Locator expressions is not going to work forsome time. Also, MSPManipulate only formats its argument into an image.Using Java APIsThe purpose of webMathematica is to allow Mathematica computations to be run by a webserver. These computations will typically involve one of the many tasks for which Mathematicais well suited, such as numerical or symbolic computation. However, sometimes it is useful in awebMathematica computation to call outside of Mathematica to gain some extra functionality.The most convenient way to do this is to make use of Java. Regular interactive Mathematicacan call to Java very easily with the J/Link toolkit, and webMathematica can do the same. Moreinformation on the concept of working with Java APIs and referencing Java objects from withinMathematica can be found in the J/Link documentation.In webMathematica two classes of calls can be distinguished: those to serverrelated APIs andthose to more general Java APIs. These are discussed in the following two sections.Server APIsCalls to server-specific APIs that govern the operation and details of a particular webMathematicasite are facilitated by definition of the following server objects.$ServletRequest$ServletResponseHttpServletRequest object for this requestHttpServletResponse object for this request