Bioclipse gets a new extension point

I hacked in a new extension point for Bioclipse yesterday, based on a proposal I made earlier. The new extension point (EP) is called ChildResourceCreator and allows creating child resources for a given IBioResource. One application where this is very useful is the CMLRSS application (earlier blog), or any RSS or Atom enriched with any other XML language. Here, child resources are created for each feed entry resource with as content the foreign XML, e.g. the CML bits in the blog.

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CML Explained

Recently, a new generation of Chemical Markup Language CML users seem to hit the learning-curve-wall; there seems to be a niche in explaining the use of CML, so here goes. My new (third) blog will discuss frequently and less frequently asked questions about the use of CML.

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Small java applet for 2D structure drawing

Trepalin et al. published in Molecules the article A Java Chemical Structure Editor Supporting the Modular Chemical Descriptor Language (MCDL) (open access PDF). The applet is about 250kB (though the article mentions 200kB) in size and downloadable from the MCDL project on SourceForge (license: Public Domain). The article compares the applet with the JChemPaint applet and notes that their applet is much smaller. Both allow a template database for automated structure diagram generation, and the database that comes with the MCDL applet contains 105 fragments, whereas the JChemPaint applet contains a few.

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Classpath 0.92 has been released

Bling! Bling!. Mark Wielaard announced the GNU Classpath 0.92 release, with the following changes: an alternative awt peer implementation based on Escher that uses the X protocol directly. Various ImageIO providers for png, gif and bmp images. Support for reading and writing midi files and reading .au and .wav files have been added. Various tools and support classes have been added for jar, native2ascii, serialver, keytool, jarsigner. A GConf based util.peers backend has been added. Support for using alternative root certificate authorities with the security and crypto packages. Start of javax.management and runtime lang.managment runtime support. NIO channels now support scatter-gather operations.

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Fortran and XML: FoX reads and writes CML

Mix one of the oldest and one of the latest computer technologies, and you get FoX (BSD license), a Fortran library for reading and writing Chemical Markup Language, and thus XML. Amazing, what Toby White achieved, though he did not start from scratch: “FoX evolved from the initial codebase of xmlf90, which was written largely by Alberto Garcia and Jon Wakelin.” (source: cml-discuss mailing list).

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new Atom(Elements.CARBON);

Something I have not completely comfortable with about the CDK in the past, is the way Atom’s are constructed:

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BlueObelisk components in Japanese

Technorati is nice in several ways, one being the feature to set up a watchlist. I have set watches on chemoinformatics, Jmol, Bioclipse and a few more. This allows me see the latest blog items on these topics. Often, the point to Asian blogs, mostly Chinese and Japanese, which I mostly find hard to read. Funny characters with Jmol somewhere in the sentence :)

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