Subject: Re: CCL:WWW developments

From: [email-masked] (Rzepa,Henry)
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 07:27:44 +0000

Steve Bachrach wrote
>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?

We are approaching Sun, who have a coordination scheme for Java
developers, to try to form (join?) a chemistry specific SIG.
The Bioinfomatics SIG is apparently already highly active,
although most members are from the commercial chemical
sector.

I do not think we can "prevent" 30 different applets being
written. What we should strive to achieve is a mechanism
for inter-operability of these. Thus two or more applets
can "talk" to each other on a document page. We need to ensure
that some sort of standards to achieve this are at least discussed
if not actually implemented.  Bear in mind that  Java is also
a "secure" mechanism, so in theory it should not be possible to
write to a disk using one. Thus it is not yet established
whether Java applets will/should allow flow of semantic and digital
information into other applications, disks etc.
We expect to report back on our contact with Sun shortly.
If anyone else knows of similar contacts being made, let
us know so that we can all speak with one voice!!