Application Development
Whether you are creating a lesson for your students, an analysis tool for your engineers, a detailed technical report for your research colleagues, or any other Maple-based application, advancements in recent releases make creating applications and sharing your work with others easier.
Maple 2018: Protecting Your Content from Changes
Maple 2018 includes the ability to protect your content from accidental changes. In addition to aiding your content creation process, this ability allows you to share your work without having to deal with users who accidentally break your application (and then complain!).
You can control whether or not entire documents, or the content of individual tables, can be modified. Non-editable content is viewed in "Player mode", where interactive components, such as buttons and sliders, continue to work.
This feature can be useful in a variety of ways. For example:
- You can give your application to students and colleagues, and there is no risk that they will accidentally, and perhaps unknowingly, modify its content, appearance, or behavior.
- For situations where randomized output can vary every time the commands are executed, you can set your document to non-editable in order to freeze your results at a particular instance. This way, you can be sure your readers will always see the specific example you discuss in the surrounding text.
- If you have spent time laying out information carefully in a table, you can lock down that table to keep it safe from accidental modification as you work on the rest of your document.
Maple 2017: Password Protected Worksheets
As of Maple 2017, you can password-protect individual worksheets stored inside a Maple Workbook, so they can only be viewed by those who have the password. These worksheets can still be executed, so you can pass parameters into the protected content, run its code, and get results out. As a result, you can share your work without sharing your IP.
(Maple 2018 also offers encrypted procedures as another method of protecting your content. Encrypted procedures behave like ordinary procedures but their definition cannot be viewed.)
Maple 2016: Workbook
The Maple Workbook, introduced in Maple 2016, makes it easy to organize and share your projects and Maple applications, simply and reliably. All related Maple documents, data, source code, variables, and other attachments are kept together in a single project file, so individual components cannot get lost or out of sync with the rest of the application. References to files in the Workbook do not rely on external file locations, so you can be confident the application will run properly when it is moved or shared, even between operating systems.
