Subject: Re: CCL:WWW developments

From: Tim Maffett <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 1996 09:18:43 -0800

At 07:40 AM 4/3/96 -0600, Steven Bachrach wrote:
>
>I will probably get flamed for bringing up this subject as being too far 
>removed from comp chem but here goes..
>
>I have been very impressed with a number of web developments like the Tripos
>fetch and sketch, and the molecular inventor work of SGI. (If you missed the
>demo of this at the ACS meeting, make sure to get your SGI rep or an MSI
>rep to show it to you!). I would like to use the plug-in Chime from MDL, but
>I'm not a windows user.

  Our Chemscape Chime Netscape Plug-In will also be available for SGI IRIX
and Macintosh 68k/PPC.  
  We are working with SGI to get the IRIX version available as soon as
possible.

>
>Anyways, I would like to poll the community towards their attitudes and
>desires in terms of how they would like to see chemical displays develop on
>the web. The "old" technology was to provide a compound in one of a variety 
>of formats (pdb, xyz, etc), attach a MIME type, and then allow the user to 
>provide the molecular viewer locally (like Xmol or RasMol). With the
>development of Netscape 2, we now have the Java option (like "fetch and 
>sketch") and the plug-in option (like chime). These latter options remove 
>the user from selecting the visualization tool. While this has advantages: 
>everyone now views the structure in the identical way, no need for the user
>to have the appropriate viewer; it also removes the freedom to choose - what 
>if you don't like the Java applet provided?

  Chime 0.8b provides a 'Save' menu item which allows a user to save
the molecule file to his local disk.  From there the user can use his
molecular viewer of choice to display the molecule.  It is not MDL's
intention to replace all molecular viewer technology with Chime, we
are just trying to make it easy to have *some* way of viewing chemical
structures withing a web page.
  Future versions of Chime will provide export type functionality
which will allow the user to save the molecule file locally in various
common molecule file formats,  e.g., This will allow the user to view an
XYZ file within a webpage, but save it locally as a MOLfile in order
to read it into a program that only supports MOLfiles.
 
>
>Before we all go and reinvent the wheel, and we have 30 different java 
>applets to rotate a molecule, can we discuss what's the "best" way to provide
>the data to the general community?
>
>Steve
>
>Steven Bachrach				
>Department of Chemistry
>Northern Illinois University
>DeKalb, Il 60115			Phone: (815)753-6863
>[email-masked]			Fax:   (815)753-4802

-tim

---

From: Tim Maffett <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 1996 09:18:43 -0800

-tim