Figure 15. Browser Interface to VChemLab Distributed Object ComputingModule

Implementation

A working version of VChemLab, suitable for viewing by both current JavaScript-enabled major commercial browsers (Netscape Navigator 3.01 (or higher) and Internet Explorer 4.0) has been published on CD-Rom²².

A trial demonstrator version of VChemLab for Distributed Object Computing has been developed²³using the Java RMI to allow downloaded client applets persistent access to a small-scale ObjectStore PSE database, containing full 3D coordinate and physicochemical data objects, located on the remote Unix HTTP server. The client applet (Fig.15) may be viewed with the latest release of the Netscape Navigator (v4.04 or higher) browser²⁴, which fully implements JDK1.1 methods and also permits Java-JavaScript communication. We will report in a future article the scaleable characteristics of this system for large molecular object databases.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the Joint Information Systems Committee (UK) for a JTAP award to fund this project.