We are proud to announce the release of the ChemDoodle Web Components library. ChemDoodle Web Components are pure javascript objects derived from ChemDoodle to solve common chemistry related tasks on the web. They leverage the technology of the HTML 5 specification’s canvas tag. These components are powerful, fully customizable, easy to implement, and are free under the open source GPL license.
In the past, it was a struggle to create immersive and impressive scientifically oriented websites. You would need to create images of structures by hand or generate them from a servlet and cache them. No longer! Now you just load the chemical to a Viewer component and change its style. You may also change the default style for entire webpages with a few lines of code. They are fully customizable. No need to remake images for every small change to your website! Look at the following three caffeine structures. They are not images! It is a single MDL MOLFile from our server, drawn in three Viewer components with different styles, the last being ACS Document 1996. There is very little overhead and long load times for images are a thing of the past.
In addition to static drawings, you can now easily introduce dynamic and interactive components to your webpages such as animations, modeling canvases and sketching tools with a few lines of javascript. Look at the following Transformer component. You can rotate (click and drag), scale (mouse wheel) and translate (right-click and drag) this molecule right on your page without installing any applets! No more worrying about how to master applets, if your visitors are compatible with them, or of any pesky security issues. ChemDoodle Web Components provides the next generation of web based scientific solutions through native browser based algorithms and interfaces.
In total, there are currently 6 unique ChemDoodle Web Components:
- Viewer– view a static styled drawing
- Rotator– provide a rotating animation of structures
- Transformer– rotate, scale and translate structures
- Doodler– draw structures with an interface that mimics ChemDoodle
- MolGrabber– provide access to databases such as PubChem right on your website
- File Loader– allow users to load their own molecule files straight to your web based algorithms
For a complete description, installation instructions, beginner’s guide and API, visit the official ChemDoodle Web Components webpage. This library is open source and released under the GNU GPL license. iChemLabs is dedicated to funding and developing this project to ensure quality and continued success. We know they will be very useful for every scientist that has a webpage. And feel free to contact us for custom development and other requests. Enjoy!