Adam Hodkin wrote;
A www site for ChemSymphony Beans is undergoing final editing and polishing. We hope to make a public announcement of it shortly. BEFORE we do this we would be most grateful for any comments or suggestions from the ChemWeb community. The shortly to be announced site will be found at:
http://www.chemsymphony.com/ ...In practice this means that you need the latest IE or NN on Windows and Solaris and the virtual machine on some platforms is not yet supporting 1.1. (We don't think there is currently a way of deploying applets made from Beans on the Mac or SGI platforms - Apple have said that they will do so soon via the Java Plug-in).
I should report that on a Mac running Internet Explorer 4.01, the MOPAC and SMILES demos work fine (and fast). Netscape 4.05 apparently should support it (implementing what looks like JDK 1.1.2) but because some of their Java classes still date back to JDK 1.02, it does not. There are rumours of a new version of Netscape (4.06?) which might solve these problems.
If anyone has any brilliant ideas about what we could do with the beans to make yet more cool demos, please tell us directly or via this forum.
I particularly liked the way these demos showed dataflow, ie that as data moves from method to method (or bean to bean) it acquires value. Normally, the traditional method of data flow is that information is lost in processing! It would certainly be nice to see ChemSymphony interaction with other 3rd party applications. I note in particular the ChemDraw and Chem3D plugins from CambridgeSoft, which are "Java" compliant. I am intrigued by what might be possible by getting Chemsymphony beans to communicate with Chemdraw/Chem3D plugins. Put another way, why invent (yet another) molecular editor, if perfectly good ones exist already! There are lots of other examples of Java <=> Java (eg JUMBO) and Java <=> Plug-in communication. For example, we have a test page http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/aptonge/JAVA/HTML/Visua2.html where a Java applet communicates with a Chime (2.0) plugged-in molecule, and of course a Chime 2.0 spectral window communicates with a Chime 2.0 molecule window. WebLab from MSI in turn illustrates how a Java applet can communicate with an external viewer (WebLab Pro). I am sure there are many more examples; indeed things are getting very confusing out there! And I have not even mentioned ActiveX! Does anyone have other chemical examples of data communication amongst different components showing inter-operability of such information, and hopefully information gain rather than loss in the process? Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY; mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)