Last week, there was a very interesting thread on the DBPedia mailing list, on using Java for doing remote SPARQL queries. This was one of the features still missing in bioclipse.rdf. Richard Cyganiak replied pointing the code in Jena which conveniently does this and which bioclipse.rdf is already using anyway.

The Uppsala and EBI CDK-teams have been working hard on finishing the rewrite of JChemPaint I started with Niels earlier. While the EBI-team focused on the applet (and Swing application), the Uppsala team, obviously, focused on the SWT side, for integration into Bioclipse.

Nature Chemistry just released the first issue with a few free papers, like Asymmetric total syntheses of (+)- and (-)-versicolamide B and biosynthetic implications by Miller et al. (DOI:10.1038/nchem.110).

Ola has released the second beta for Bioclipse 2.0. Things are getting along, and I will not go into details on the molecules table Arvid is working on, the 1GB+ SD file support, the validating CML editor , the support for XMPP services , or the brand new welcome page which will guide new users around in what Bioclipse has to offer.

I gave this 10 minute presentation on MetWare this afternoon at the International Metabolomics Workshop :

On Monday I showed two screenshot showing our new XMPP-based web/cloud services in action inside Taverna.

As you might have read, Bioclipse has scripting support (see for example, Scripting JChemPaint ), and that we have been collection them on Gist and indexing them on Delicious with the tags bioclipse and gist. This provides a nice overview of what you can do with the current SVN version of Bioclipse2. And, hopefully, when released, allow users to quickly learn about Bioclipse features, allow people to share scripts etc.

With the general framework set up for editing and validation of CML documents , it was fairly easy to support the PubChem XML file format schema too.

One advantage of using XML is that one can rely on good support in libraries for functionality. When parsing XML, one does not have to take care of the syntax, and focus on the data and its semantics. This comes at the expense of verbosity, though, but having the ability to express semantics explicitly is a huge benefit for flexibility.

11 years ago, a day more or less, I bought an the special issue of CHIP which shipped Debian 1.3.1. I think I’ve tried SuSe and RedHat earlier that year, but this Debian release made me switch away from proprietary products 98% (taxes I still had to do with Windows98). Right now, I am mostly running Ubuntu, which leans heavily on the work of the Debian project.

The reason why I have not blogged in more than two weeks, was that I was hoping to blog about the CDK 1.2.0 release. This was originally aimed at September, slipped into October, November and then December. There were only three show stoppers (see this wiki page), one of which the IChemObject interfaces were not properly tested.