4 ms·

Care to elaborate? I was one of the developers behind APIFunction and GenerateHTTPResponse. If you are you talking about the ability to deploy a REST API to our

by carlob 8y ago

Care to elaborate? I was one of the developers behind APIFunction and GenerateHTTPResponse. If you are you talking about the ability to deploy a REST API to our cloud I think you are wrong and I'd be happy to show you how.

phonon 8y ago
I don't want to use the Wolfram cloud. I have no interest in tracking number of monthly API calls. Say I wrote a nice notebook that does a bunch of useful things. What's an easy way to deploy it on a server and connect to it with a REST API? It takes me a few minutes to do it with Python using Chalice and AWS Lambda. I'm also not a fan of the primitive URL query syntax. Why isn't there a way to generate an OpenAPI? A schema?
- carlob 8y ago
  I absolutely feel your pain. As a matter of fact I've been lobbying internally for a refresh of webMathematica for years. Maybe something is going to come out in the near future. Please hold on :)
  - marmaduke 8y ago
    I would second this, there’s no way I can deploy APIs to your cloud and meet compliance requirements for data protection.
  - phonon 8y ago
    I was hoping there would be a big API rethink in this area for version 12 :-( What I don't get, is that long term, making Mathematica useful for actual server based production environments would open up an order of magnitude larger revenue stream. Yet all I see is a fragmented, difficult to use/understand/license environment. There seem to be a dozen, slightly different initiatives, some basically unmaintained. I mean, what the heck is all this? https://www.wolfram.com/engine/ https://www.wolfram.com/engine/ I should seamlessly be able to prototype something through the notebook interface, and then deploy it, in a standard generic way, and on a server I control, that can be consumed by anyone who can read through a OpenAPI (with auto generated docs and schemas). Setting Alpha aside, what you seem to offer is a) a prototyping/notebook environment, like Jupyter (yes, I know you came first) b) a programming language tightly coupled with a really nice stdlib The programming language itself, realistically, has no use outside your libraries. And there seem to be very little third party Mathematica libraries. The notebook environment is only useful for prototyping. So the market you should want to grow into, is, "How do we allow people to build something really easily, and then deploy really simply, in their own server/DB environment, with reasonably standard API interfaces?". The attempts to integrate with Python are a good start, but seem to be more focused on the prototyping aspects. Something like https://www.django-rest-framework.org/ https://www.django-rest-framework.org/ should be built in.
    - coliveira 8y ago
      Mathematica is not tied to the notebook interface. The notebook is the most interactive way to use it, but you can save code in standard files and run it through the engine. You had always the option to call this code from C, but now they are adding Python bindings too. So, in my opinion, the only thing that limits Mathematica to be used for web services is licensing. I think they know this and probably it is the reason why they don't spend too much effort trying to sell this use case.
    - kenkangxgwe 8y ago
      Wolfram Language lacks many open specifications that a usual high-level programming language should expose to their users, such as stdin stream, concurrency, memory model and so on. To some extent, their toolchain and design pattern are behind the state of the art, while the leaders are confident about the design, cf. https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op.... Hoping they are pushing this great software forward to another 30 years.
  - grigjd3 8y ago
    A shrink-wrapped version of the instant API that could be installed on a server would be a good product.

by carlob 8y ago

phonon 8y ago

I don't want to use the Wolfram cloud. I have no interest in tracking number of monthly API calls. Say I wrote a nice notebook that does a bunch of useful things. What's an easy way to deploy it on a server and connect to it with a REST API? It takes me a few minutes to do it with Python using Chalice and AWS Lambda. I'm also not a fan of the primitive URL query syntax. Why isn't there a way to generate an OpenAPI? A schema?

carlob 8y ago
I absolutely feel your pain. As a matter of fact I've been lobbying internally for a refresh of webMathematica for years. Maybe something is going to come out in the near future. Please hold on :)
- marmaduke 8y ago
  I would second this, there’s no way I can deploy APIs to your cloud and meet compliance requirements for data protection.
- phonon 8y ago
  I was hoping there would be a big API rethink in this area for version 12 :-( What I don't get, is that long term, making Mathematica useful for actual server based production environments would open up an order of magnitude larger revenue stream. Yet all I see is a fragmented, difficult to use/understand/license environment. There seem to be a dozen, slightly different initiatives, some basically unmaintained. I mean, what the heck is all this? https://www.wolfram.com/engine/ https://www.wolfram.com/engine/ I should seamlessly be able to prototype something through the notebook interface, and then deploy it, in a standard generic way, and on a server I control, that can be consumed by anyone who can read through a OpenAPI (with auto generated docs and schemas). Setting Alpha aside, what you seem to offer is a) a prototyping/notebook environment, like Jupyter (yes, I know you came first) b) a programming language tightly coupled with a really nice stdlib The programming language itself, realistically, has no use outside your libraries. And there seem to be very little third party Mathematica libraries. The notebook environment is only useful for prototyping. So the market you should want to grow into, is, "How do we allow people to build something really easily, and then deploy really simply, in their own server/DB environment, with reasonably standard API interfaces?". The attempts to integrate with Python are a good start, but seem to be more focused on the prototyping aspects. Something like https://www.django-rest-framework.org/ https://www.django-rest-framework.org/ should be built in.
  - coliveira 8y ago
    Mathematica is not tied to the notebook interface. The notebook is the most interactive way to use it, but you can save code in standard files and run it through the engine. You had always the option to call this code from C, but now they are adding Python bindings too. So, in my opinion, the only thing that limits Mathematica to be used for web services is licensing. I think they know this and probably it is the reason why they don't spend too much effort trying to sell this use case.
  - kenkangxgwe 8y ago
    Wolfram Language lacks many open specifications that a usual high-level programming language should expose to their users, such as stdin stream, concurrency, memory model and so on. To some extent, their toolchain and design pattern are behind the state of the art, while the leaders are confident about the design, cf. https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-open-source-a-dozen-reasons/ https://blog.wolfram.com/2019/04/02/why-wolfram-tech-isnt-op.... Hoping they are pushing this great software forward to another 30 years.
- grigjd3 8y ago
  A shrink-wrapped version of the instant API that could be installed on a server would be a good product.