There is still need for an open source structure editor applet …
… with a reasonably small footprint … and we’ll soon have one that is actually usable.
Well, with the JChemPaint applet, as used in NMRShiftDB, we do have an open source structure drawing applet available but we (as in “the makers”) have to admit that it still has a pretty big foot print. If you look at Peter Ertl’s famous editor in action or the new ChemWriter editor by Rich Apodaca’s MetaMolecular, you see how fast loading improves your user experience. Our ChEBI database’s new structure search still uses a ChemAxon Marvin Sketch applet, but since we promise the world a full open source version of ChEBI, we’ll be in need for a free (as in speech) replacement.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel. Our colleague Egon Willighagen reports on his recent progress in revamping the old JChemPaint heritage into something beautiful and usable.
Peter Murray-Rust comments on the development.
Egon has built on work done by Niels Out in a Dutch Summer of Code project last year. Niels had produced both the beautiful Java 2D based renderer as well as a provisional controller.
Categorised as: Blue Obelisk, Chemistry Development Kit, Chemoinformatics, Databases, Open Science, Open Source
Christoph, We would definitely welcome a lighter version of the applet and would definitely be interested in adding it as an option to ChemSpider