Having gone through the (sometimes painful) process of writing Java applets for display over the WWW I'll try to make a few dispassionate comments. In my experience *all* graphics languages take time to get off the ground. I've been through lots. I know over 10 ways of getting a completely blank screen. Java is no more than a year old - if you go back to (say) GL or whatever at that vintage it was no better. Java has been extremely ambitious. A multiplatform *graphics* tool, that requires no pre-installation was unconceivable even 2 years ago. I have struggled to get code distributed on more than one platform and Java is terrific compared to anything else. (Try providing binaries for every flavour of UNIX box; send makefiles, and half the people won't even start). Ironically Java, which was trumpeted for its graphics , has relatively poor graphics (at present) but is superb for writing Object-oriented code. It has been precisely what I have been waiting for. For the first time it offers the chemical community to develop code cooperatively and to reuse methods (especially algorithms) rather than reinventing the wheel. If anyone would like to join in I am starting a collaborative venture under the Open Molecule Foundation (http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/omf/) JDK1.02 is rather primtive (you have to write your own callbacks, etc.) but 1.1. is a great advance. It will be about 3 months (I believe) before the browsers support it, but I expect to see a quantum leap at that stage. It implements approaches that very few people in our community know about - IMO we have a long way to go to catch up with cutting edge computer science. Java is not _completely_ portable at present as there can be bugs in the browser, bugs in the code which only show up in certain environment, and possibly problems configuring the server. But these will be solved and quite quickly. Other disciplines (e.g. finance) are taking to it in a large way). The WWW has been so successful it has raised our expectations that we should be able to get immediate, effortless, high-quality distributed computing. The expectations are ahead of the reality, but not by a huge amount, I think. P. Peter Murray-Rust (PeterMR, ) Director, Virtual School of Molecular Sciences Pharmaceutical Sciences, Nottingham University, NG7 2RD, UK; Tel 44-115-9515100 Fax 5110 http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms/; OMF: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/omf/ ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)