34

2.6.1 MSP Mathematica Application

The MSP Mathematica application contains various Mathematica packages and utilities such as documentation. It is

already  installed  in  the  webMathematica  layout  so  that  webMathematica  will  operate  without  any  extra  steps.

However, you may wish to use some of the functions or to view the webMathematica documentation in the Mathe 

matica Help Browser.  In order to do this, you will need to install  the application.  This installation  step is optional

because  it  is  not  needed  for  webMathematica  to  run.  The  contents  of  the  archive  is  given  in  the  

Appendix:  File

Layout

.

The MSP Mathematica application is in archive form on the webMathematica Tools CD ROM. Unpack the appropri 

ate archive  and  place  its contents  into the  AddOns/Applications  directory  in your  Mathematica  directory.  It

should  then  be  possible  to  launch  Mathematica  and  choose  Rebuild  Help  Index  from  the  Help  menu.  This  will

cause the webMathematica documentation to appear in the Help Browser under the Add ons section.

The MSP  Mathematica  application  contains  useful  functions  for formatting  Mathematica  expressions  into 

HTML

tables and select tags, in addition to utilities useful for using 

SVG

.

2.6.2 Launching webMathematica Automatically

It  is  common  for  a  web  application,  such  as  webMathematica,  to  be  launched  automatically  whenever  the  server

machine  starts.  This  section  will  review  the  ways  that  this  can  be  done.  Of  course  this  is  typically  done  by  the

system administrator;  the information  here is something  that they can use to adapt to the conventions  of your own

system. The instructions are different for Unix and Windows. These instructions will focus on launching Tomcat, if

you use some other servlet container you will need to consult its documentation.

Unix

Tomcat  can  be  launched  automatically  by  adding  it to  a  system  startup  script.  The  description  here is  typical  of  a

Linux RedHat system. It is a good idea to first study the instructions for setting up 

Tomcat on Unix

.

A common way to launch is to add a script to the initialization directory init.d and making a link to the appropri 

ate startup directory (for example rc3.d). The script will make definitions for starting and stopping tomcat, making

use of the tomcat user that was created. A sample script is shown below.

 .