VChemLab : A Virtual Chemistry Laboratory. The Storage, Retrieval and Display of Chemical Information
using Standard Internet Tools.

Henry S.Rzepa & Alan P.Tonge
Department of Chemistry
Imperial College
London SW7 2AY

The design and implementation of two interactive Internet-based applications for the storage, retrieval and display of molecular structures, spectra and physicochemical properties is described. The first, suitable for small-scale laboratory or teaching applications, uses a JavaScript-controlled structure to load data from discrete files located on a server or a CD-ROM into a local Web browser. The second, developed for scaling to larger commercial-sized applications, uses a Java-based Distributed Object Computing architecture to allow a local client applet to have persistent access to a remote object database, in which information for the different chemical classes has been stored. Both browser applications have a dynamically-created page structure and use readily- available Plugins and Java applets for the active display of 3D molecular structures and their experimental spectra.