Can Wolfram's Player Pro use proprietary packages?

Question

A few entwined/related questions:

Can Wolfram's Player Pro use proprietary packages?

I have searched Wolfram's site pages on Player Pro and don't see anything that provides a clear answer to this question. See:

• CDF, Player Pro, and Mathematica Features Comparison Chart
• FAQ

If yes, does it work the same as in Mathematica?

To load packages automatically in Mathematica I typically use the "Applications" directory and then place an init.m package with a Get[] command in the "Kernel" directory. The following code identifies the appropriate directories:

    appDirectory = FileNameJoin[{$UserBaseDirectory, "Applications"}]
kerDirectory = FileNameJoin[{$UserBaseDirectory, "Kernel"}]

If it works differently, can someone explain how it works and what directory structure it uses?

A related question got placed last year, but as it never received any answers and I thought it might benefit from a more specific formation.

Answer 1

It basically works exactly the same as for Mathematica, but there are some subtle differences:

• PlayerPro will not load plain text package files but only Encoded ones, see e.g. the player pro developer guidelines.
• $BaseDirectory, $UserBaseDirectory and some other $*Directory variables will usually be different, typically you'd need to StringReplace "Mathematica" with "MathematicaPlayerPro" in their values.
• There is no documentation center contained in PlayerPro, so you can't read the standard documentation of a package from within PlayerPro. You can instead provide a button in your GUI which opens a documentation notebook from the package/application directory.
• There is no Palettes menu in PlayerPro, so you don't have easy access to any palettes defined in a package. You can, on the other hand provide e.g. buttons which programmatically open any such palette by filename.
• In PlayerPro you can't edit Notebook files and that might also affect some of the programmatic ways to edit Notebook files with FrontEnd functions. Many (Most?) of those programmatic ways do work, though. I don't know of a source for documentation about what exactly works, so that's an area where one has to rely on try and error...
• As Jagra has found the hard way, kernel initialization file Kernel/init.m seems to not be read with PlayerPro, also the Autoload directory doesn't work as on Mathematica, in combination there probably is no simple way to load packages at Kernel startup. You can, OTOH, load a package with the Initialization option of either Manipulate or DynamicModule, so for typical Player-apps with a graphical user interface that might not be a serious limitation.

I can't remember that I ever had to change anything else for even relatively advanced applications to run in PlayerPro, but other people use other features, so there could be well more things not working...