Comments Re Active Labs demo

[peter murray rust]

Having gone through the (sometimes painful) process of writing Java
applets for display over the WWW I'll try to make a few dispassionate
comments.

	In my experience *all* graphics languages take time to get off
the ground.  I've been through lots.  I know over 10 ways of getting a
completely blank screen.  Java is no more than a year old - if you go back
to (say) GL or whatever at that vintage it was no better.

	Java has been extremely ambitious.  A multiplatform *graphics*
tool, that requires no pre-installation was unconceivable even 2 years
ago.  I have struggled to get code distributed on more than one platform
and Java is terrific compared to anything else.  (Try providing binaries
for every flavour of UNIX box; send makefiles, and half the people won't
even start).

	Ironically Java, which was trumpeted for its graphics , has
relatively poor graphics (at present) but is superb for writing
Object-oriented code.  It has been precisely what I have been waiting
for.  For the first time it offers the chemical community to develop code
cooperatively and to reuse methods (especially algorithms) rather than
reinventing the wheel.  If anyone would like to join in I am starting a
collaborative venture under the Open Molecule Foundation
(http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/omf/)

	JDK1.02 is rather primtive (you have to write your own callbacks,
etc.) but 1.1. is a great advance.  It will be about 3 months (I believe)
before the browsers support it, but I expect to see a quantum leap at that
stage.  It implements approaches that very few people in our community
know about - IMO we have a long way to go to catch up with cutting edge
computer science.

	Java is not _completely_ portable at present as there can be bugs
in the browser, bugs in the code which only show up in certain
environment, and possibly problems configuring the server.  But these will
be solved and quite quickly.  Other disciplines (e.g. finance) are taking
to it in a large way).

	The WWW has been so successful it has raised our expectations that
we should be able to get immediate, effortless, high-quality distributed
computing.  The expectations are ahead of the reality, but not by a huge
amount, I think.

	P.

Peter Murray-Rust (PeterMR, ) Director, Virtual School of Molecular Sciences
Pharmaceutical Sciences, Nottingham University, NG7 2RD, UK; Tel 44-115-9515100
Fax 5110 http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/vsms/; OMF: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/omf/

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