Hello Internet Chemist Is there an academic group that would be interested to collaborate with us on this innovative and useful project. ChemSymphony is a platform-independent set of interactive Java applets that allows 3-D molecular structures to be easily incorporated into HTML documents. The structures can be manipulated in real time, rendered in a variety of styles which may be edited by the user. We will shortly release a 2D sketcher. The ChemSketcher has been developed primarily as a tool for generating, editing and manipulating search queries. It is not intended to be a Desktop publishing tool, rather it allows user to quickly enter/edit his own structures so that these can be passed to other applets for searches, calculations, listing, display etc. Our alpha-test version of the sketcher can be seen at: http://www.cherwell.com/cssubmit/ (an unlinked page and no documentation yet). While testing the ChemSketcher applet it has struck us that the ChemSymphony suite can be used to create a valuable Internet resource. From the sample page we have the ChemSketcher pointing to two or three databases which the user can then search. The procedure is as follows: 1.The user draws a chemical fragment a 'substructure' which is a subset of what he seeks. 2.When the substructure is complete the user moves to another SubmitStructure applet where he can generate a SMILES string which he may then submit to a database. 3.The applet knows which database to search because it obtains this information from some parameters in the HTML page in which the applet is itself embedded. Look at the source for the page. 4.An efficient and powerful feature of this arrangement is that the SubmitStructure applet takes the parameters from the HTML page and uses them to create an option on its Action menu for the user. The Action Menu and the combination of Applets can handle a very large list of databases which can be extended by the simple procedure of copying, pasting and editing some simple HTML code. A crucial element of this procedure is that the list of target databases can be indefinitely and automatically extended. This opens the possibility of setting up a procedure which could search the complete www for molecular structures, or allow the enduser to select a set of databases which he wishes to search on a periodic basis, or to select subsets which are known to be efficient for special purposes. This would be a nice project for a collaboration with an academic group which is trying to build internet resources for chemists. Being a dedicated software company we do not have the motivation to search the web for molecular resources and develop the editorial resource base that should support an effort of this kind but we would be very interested to work with a group that does want to do this. Java is clearly the best way of doing this. If you are interested in helping this to happen, please contact me Adam Adam Hodgkin adam@cherwell.com 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)