As legislation and good practice increasingly requires "wet" chemistry departments to take good care of their stock of chemicals, and the safety and disposal requirements become more stringent, so keeping good inventories becomes crucial. I noted that such inventories have been kept in some sort of e-form since around the mid 1980s, but often on software not well designed for the purpose. There are of course some specifically designed packages, eg ISISBase from MDL, Chemfolder from ACD, ChemFinder and e-labnotebook Cambridgesoft, Chemical Inventory from a company of the same name. There are probably a few others (apologies for not mentioning them). Where a consolidated database exists, its often rear-ended by eg Oracle, or other heavy duty systems, and clearly the market is designed for the large pharmas. Here for example, our financial system runs under Oracle, and of course its highly secure, not intuitive to the average academic or student, requires a Java plugin and a 600+ MHz system to run (that specification is not ours!) and dare I say it, not exactly fast! The increasing popularity of Opensource software led us to speculate how easily it might be to construct such a system using open standards, opensource tools, and W3C protocols. We did this because a) the software noted above, which often has many strengths, b) is also often not free, and c) not easily extensible or adaptable to local needs. We needed something Web based, and (almost) as easy to fine tune as eg HTML. We came up with ChemStock. This uses widely accepted software such as Apache Web server, openSSL for security, LDAP for directory queries, PHP as a scripting front end and MySQL as the database engine. A demo version for anyone interested is at http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/csdemo/ It took about four weeks to write about 1200 lines of PHP, ( but no hard core "code" was involved) and we anticipate it will be readily maintainable. We hope it will run on pretty much any browser since (the theory is) it emits only standard XHTML. Thus far, its been tested with 45,000 entries with no speed hit (queries take just a few seconds, and a full export of the entire database only a minute or so). We have probably reinvented the wheel, but using PHP was an interesting learning curve. If any chem dept out there finds it useful we hope to distribute a tarball shortly. If anyone has an alternative system which is as easy if not easier to set up and use, do let the list know! -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax) +44 0778 6268 220 (Mobile) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AY, UK. 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)