September 15, 2009
Wolfram Research Releases webMathematica 3
A tool for deploying interactivity to the Web
Wolfram Research has announced availability of webMathematica 3, a new version of its
technology for adding dynamic content to the web. webMathematica 3 features innovative new performance and development capabilities, which lets users build and deploy websites with interactive calculations and visualizations. webMathematica 3 integrates capabilities of both Mathematica 6 and 7 with its web server technology
"Just as Mathematica 6 introduced instant interactivity for Mathematica, webMathematica 3 does the same for the web," explains Tom Wickham-Jones, Director of Kernel Technology at Wolfram Research.
Performance and development features of webMathematica 3 include:
- Expression language and custom tags. webMathematica 3 comes with support for a more concise way to call to Mathematica from web pages. It also contains a library with a number of useful tags, which provide valuable tools such as redirecting flow as web pages are generated
- Queuing system. webMathematica 3 allows long-running or asynchronous computation jobs to be executed by a new queuing system.
- Support for Wolfram Workbench. Wolfram Workbench provides a number of features that help to accelerate the development of webMathematica content. webMathematica 3 integrates with Wolfram Workbench so that Mathematica code can be debugged as it runs in the server.
- Web services. webMathematica 3 enables users to write REST and SOAP web services that use Mathematica.
- New logging system. A new, highly configurable logging system helps to track different types of errors and to identify problems so that they can be resolved easily.
- Improved kernel monitor. The kernel monitor has new code for monitoring memory usage, running time, concurrent requests, and Java objects, which helps to improve the reliability of the server. It allows starting and stopping of individual kernel pools, canceling individual computations, and monitoring of queued jobs for progress and errors.
- *Improved kernel interaction. webMathematica 3 launches kernels as soon as the server starts and launches all kernels in parallel, which helps to improve the startup time for the server. It also has a number of new configuration tools, which limit the use of time and memory by the kernel; this helps to improve the reliability of the server. Kernels are automatically restarted in the background, so service remains uninterrupted.
webMathematica is based on Java Servlet technology, making installation simple and enabling seamless integration to standard server applications.
