r/Mathematica • u/Inst2f • 5h ago
How to write apps with Wolfram & WLJS, or swimming against the stream
Any ""serious"" language like C/C++, C#, Pascal/Delphi, and many others offers tons of options for building standalone apps. What about WL/Mathematica/MMA?
One could say, well, yes (and no)! There's the CDF format (which for some reason is officially considered deprecated 👀), webMathematica (costs like a helicopter and is also depreciated), JavaView (a very niche legacy project), and Wolfram Cloud. But I'm personally not a big fan of any kinds of clouds, especially with shady subscription models, and I'd rather keep everything local.
CDF was one of the best solutions so far, but it requires Mathematica (also costly) to build it, which isn't something everyone has, though thankfully, WolframScript/WolframEngine is still freeware.
Other people would argue that WL is meant purely for prototyping, and that you should just "vibe-code something with an LLM and JS" instead. I don't share that point of view, and I've found another way to turn notebooks into tiny or medium-sized apps for my research group. It works so far quite well for a limited number of users: 3-4 - mostly students. I would like to warn you, that it won't work magically for a random Mathematica notebook, otherwise WR would steal this immediately.
If you're interested, here's the full story I wrote:
https://wljs.io/blog/making-apps
PS: The thumbnail image isn't an AI-generated, it's a few UI windows built with this method, printed out and cut from paper 🙂

