MathLink and CDF

Question

So far I have read that some things are not supported in CDFs. Istvan-zachar mentioned very useful things in his post. Unfortunately he mentioned that

MathLink operations, including J/Link and .NET/Link, are not supported.

This is taken straight from wolfram.com under the "Interactivity in .cdf Files" section. In the past I was messing around with MathLink because I wanted to create functions that would execute faster. For an example of a complete MathLink program look at this old post of mine. In there I created an interactive program that uses the MathLink program. The question now, regardless of what wolfram says about no support for MathLink operations is,

Has anyone been able to export this type of programs? Is it possible to embed the MathLink program in the cdf file? If not, can we make the cdf file create the link to the MathLink program?

I suppose that we need to be aware that if this is possible then it would only work in computers running the same operating system that compiled the MathLink program. That is, if I compiled in Mac OS X, then the CDF would not run properly under Windows.

Update:

Thanks to Mark McClure now I know how to make the function available to the cdf document. The problem now is that I get this:

Only after I click on Enable Dynamics the desired result:

This tells me that the CDF was able to load the MathLink program but it will not let it run. I'm aware that this is do to security. I was reading here about the trusted path. Well, instead of adding a path I moved the cdf file and the MathLink program to a trusted directory. If I open it with Mathematica then it opens with no problem. But, if I were to open it with the CDF Player then I run into the issue I just mentioned. It requires me to click on the "Enable Dynamics" button. I believe this is what makes the CDF not being able to be displayed online. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

As per your request here is a way you can run this as an embedded CDF. The problem you have described is that a CDF embedded on a webpage can, in some circumstances, be considered untrusted and therefore raises a security flag. To get around this you need to make the "enable dynamics" button appear so the user can allow the dynamic content to run. This button will appear when you run a CDF in full screen mode so you need to tell an embedded CDF to run as full screen mode. The way to do that is to add an undocumented option {fullscreen:'true'} to the javascript that gets created by the CDF wizard:

<script src="http://www.wolfram.com/cdf-player/plugin/v2.1/cdfplugin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var cdf = new cdf_plugin();
cdf.embed("http://path.to/myCDF.cdf", 500, 600,{fullscreen:'true'});
</script>

Answer 2

In my experience, MathLink and J/Link can be easily accessed in CDF using either Mathematica or CDF Player. I've attached a screenshot of a MathLink dependent dynamic running in CDF Player.

Of course, there's no guarantee of future compatibility.