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/ The 'newest' element of the site is under the 'extranet' button where we have a MOPAC demo and a SMILES demo which deploys some aspects of ChemSymphony's data conversion mechanisms. These are applets built with JavaBeans so they require a JDK 1.1 environment. 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). Sun have produced a Java Plug-in an attempt to 'level the palying field' and we would be interested to hear from users whether the plug-in is an improvement. You will need to be patient while the applets download, but we think the speed is acceptable once everything is sitting in your browser. Of course, our pages can only demonstrate applets, and then only at the speed of the internet. The performance should be much better on an intranet and for evey applet made from Beans there are corresponding applications, which will often bring additional advantages (eg in the use of the clipboard, saving to disk etc). The MOPAC demo is purely a demo (not for serious chemistry). If a research group would like to develop, improve and host our implementation using MOPAC or any other suitable calculation engine Cherwell Scientific would be pleased to offer the group a free set of beans to develop such a public access site. 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. Please send any bug reports or performance observations to chemsymphony@cherwell.com. Adam --- --- Adam Hodgkin | e-mail: adam@cherwell.com Chairman | Phone: +44 (0)1865 784810 Cherwell Scientific Publishing | Fax: +44 (0)1865 784801 Oxford OX4 4GA, UK | URL: http://www.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)
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)
participants (2)
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Adam Hodgkin
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Rzepa, Henry