What’s New in CDF?
My annual summary of the state of CDF

André Kuzniarek

Executive Director, Document and Media Systems
Wolfram Research

Join the Conversation #WolframTechConf

Summary

CDF Player updates and release plan

Browser and plugin status

CDF in the cloud

“Portable CDF”

Still to come

Resources

CDF Player updates and release plan

CDF Player for 10.3 is completed, web updates will finish early next week

New build process transition slowed us down a bit with first V10 Player release

Now we can see the payoff in shortest turnaround time ever after primary product releases

Primary new things this year:

Multicore support — 4 cores in FreeCDF, 8 or more in EnterpriseCDF/Player Pro

Player Pro activation (via Help menu and Welcome Screen)

Copy/paste to/from InputField

Welcome screen repressed when opening desktop files directly

Connectivity for all link types (WSTP, .NETLink, JLink, RLink) for EnterpriseCDF

Browser and plugin status

Plugins are a thing of the past

Reminder: The CDF Player plugin is the same as in other Wolfram products

NPAPI plugin no longer supported by Chrome

Mozilla/Firefox announced support will end at the end of 2016

They already block plugins (requiring interaction)

Do not support PPAPI (Pepper)

Safari does similar blocking, but Apple makes no announcements in advance

Microsoft Edge does not support plugins other than Flash

Minor plugin issue affecting 10.2/10.3

Translation code captions display by default when browser or OS language is set to something other than English

This can cause the length of the displayed content to change, which could be bad for embedded CDFs

The fix is to set the following at notebook level:
	TranslationOptions->{“Enabled”->False}

CDF in the cloud

Demonstrations:

Fern Fractals

Bicycle Wheels Using Curves Of Constant Width

A Gothic Window

Cobweb Diagrams of Elementary Cellular Automata

Spherical Models of Polyhedra

Order, Chaos, and the Formation of a Cantor Set Attractor in Elementary Cellular Automata

CDF site:

Plugin example

Cloud example

MOOC-oriented (courseware) framework:

With embedded video and working notebook

CDF cloud terms still being worked through

Cost burden in providing server-based kernels and hosting

Needs to correlate to cloud subscription tiers

Private cloud is like ultimate enterprise solution

“Portable CDF”

CDF Players in one ZIP archive

No player installation process

Java file for launching CDF file from appropriate player

Still to come (future after V10)

Mobile

SDK for iPad available now (for building Objective-C / XCode wrapper for CDF content)

iPad CDF player still coming, along with Calculator and Demonstrations apps, after Wolfram Cloud app

Rob gave a talk yesterday (Wednesday) @ 3:30

I’m short on details, but still ok to ping me for updates

I believe the iPad CDF Player is coming together by end of year

Certificate-based security authorization

No more dynamics warnings

Means to establish verified users via public signing mechanism

Allows for CDF as default file format for Wolfram products

Potential for DRM

CDF archive format, with strong encryption capability (potential for DRM)

ZIP-based metfile but with CDF MIME-type

Distribute complete application layouts as CDF files

Encrypted ZIP offers more security potential than Wolfram Language encoding

Tied with certification offers strong, secure potential for DRM

Resources

New CDF101 training course

http://www.wolfram.com/training/courses/cdf101.html

Website updates reminder:

http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/resources/

http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/compare-cdf/customer-stories.en.html

http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/adopting-cdf/licensing-options.html

http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/adopting-cdf/cdf-and-mathematica-comparison.en.html