Paul Bracher and Joshua Finkelstein pointed my attention to a nice discussion in Nature on the future of chemistry, in What Chemists Want to Know, by Philip Ball. Paul and Joshua already reviewed it thoroughly, but I could not resist commenting in it too. Having chosen chemistry as specialization when I went to university, and with a minor in supramolecular chemistry, this is a something I do relate to.

Open source chemoinformatics has become a common phenomenon, though many projects are small in nature: source code is developed by only few developers, or even in a closed manner and released when considered done. Within open source software there is room for distinguishing a subset of open development chemoinformatics, that is, Bazar-like, instead of Cathedral-like (see ESR’s famous writing).

Chemical Blogspace is up and running fine for some time now. Since the start the number of aggregated blogs increased from 19 to 64 now, of which a number are situated at ChemBlogs which is a site where you can run a blog. Meanwhile, the number of cited papers went up to 186! The JACS is most popular so far, followed by the Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed.

The Bioclipse Workshop has ended and, for just three days, turned out quite productive. We have first bits of scripting support for JavaScript using Rhino. At this moment the scripting plugin needs to explicit depend on plugins to be able to access their classpath, but we plan to solve that.

The Bioclipse Workshop is in progress, and Ola is now leading a discussion about future releases and functionality. Proceedings are live updated, and presentation sheets will be available shortly.

The Blue Obelisk mailing list has seen an interesting discussion on ambiguity in the term ‘open source’, triggered by a study by Beth Ritter Guth. For example, Jean-Claude Bradley performs ‘open source’ science (see his Useful Chemistry blog) who is not opposed to using closed source software, while the Blue Obelisk is about ‘open source’ software.

Unit testing is important when developing source code. JUnit provides a library to facilitate this in Java, and Eclipse had the functionality to run JUnit tests.

There are many ways to contribute to opensource software (OSS), programming only being one of them. I develop OSS, but use OSS too. For example, I am a big user of the Linux kernel, the KDE desktop, Kubuntu, Debian (I have unstable in a chroot), Firefox, Eclipse, Classpath, and many, many others. What these have in common, is that I generally have no time to look into the source code of these projects.

Joerg Wegner recently blogged about Chemogenomics: structuring the drug discovery process to gene families by C.J. Harris and A. P. Stevens in Drug Discov Today (DOI: 10.1016/j.drudis.2006.08.013). This review article provides a nice overview of a trend in mathematical modelling of the interaction of small organic molecules with proteins, often referred to as QSAR.

Google has set up a new search enginge specifically for source code: /* Code Search */. Important difference with their normal search engine is that it allows restricting your search by programming language, license and filename and package. I have not been able to figure out how to use ‘package’ yet, but the others are pretty clear.

I have heard that bioinformatics is ahead of chemoinformatics. However, I discoverd that this is not necessarily the case, while preparing for a homology modeling course I gave this week at the CUBIC. Open Access is really no issue there, with open access journals and many open access databases. But it is different when it comes down to open source software.