Martin Szugat reported that a beta for BioJava 1.5 has been released. New features include: a new biojavax package with extension on the basic functionlity, such as the RichSequence.IOTools and the RichSequence object; a genetic algorithm library; features that allow manipulation of 3D structure files and objects; and non-HMM implementations of the NW and SW alignment algorithms.

ケムインフォマティクスに虚空投げ runs a story on how to calculate geometrical properties of a 3D structure using CDK’s ForceFieldTools. This class contains a few methods to calculate distances between atoms and angles between bonds.

R News just released a special issue on the use of the versatile statistics program R in chemistry. It features six articles amongst which one by Rajarshi Guha on the CDK-R bridge, and one by my supervisor and me on the use of self-organizing maps to cluster crystal structures.

We all know chemical space; Chemical blogspace (Cb) is different: it is the chemistry discussed in blogspace. Cb is build on the opensource software of Postgenomic.com which I bloged on before . The now running Cb aggregates 19 blogs and, like the original, extracts linked (cited or reviewed) articles from literature.

I hacked in a new extension point for Bioclipse yesterday, based on a proposal I made earlier. The new extension point (EP) is called ChildResourceCreator and allows creating child resources for a given IBioResource. One application where this is very useful is the CMLRSS application (earlier blog ), or any RSS or Atom enriched with any other XML language.

Recently, a new generation of Chemical Markup Language CML users seem to hit the learning-curve-wall; there seems to be a niche in explaining the use of CML, so here goes. My new (third) blog will discuss frequently and less frequently asked questions about the use of CML.

Trepalin et al. published in Molecules the article A Java Chemical Structure Editor Supporting the Modular Chemical Descriptor Language (MCDL) (open access PDF). The applet is about 250kB (though the article mentions 200kB) in size and downloadable from the MCDL project on SourceForge (license: Public Domain). The article compares the applet with the JChemPaint applet and notes that their applet is much smaller.

Bling! Bling!. Mark Wielaard announced the GNU Classpath 0.92 release, with the following changes: an alternative awt peer implementation based on Escher that uses the X protocol directly. Various ImageIO providers for png, gif and bmp images. Support for reading and writing midi files and reading .au and .wav files have been added. Various tools and support classes have been added for jar, native2ascii, serialver, keytool, jarsigner.

Mix one of the oldest and one of the latest computer technologies, and you get FoX (BSD license), a Fortran library for reading and writing Chemical Markup Language, and thus XML. Amazing, what Toby White achieved, though he did not start from scratch: “FoX evolved from the initial codebase of xmlf90, which was written largely by Alberto Garcia and Jon Wakelin.” (source: cml-discuss mailing list).

Something I have not completely comfortable with about the CDK in the past, is the way Atom’s are constructed:

Technorati is nice in several ways, one being the feature to set up a watchlist. I have set watches on chemoinformatics, Jmol, Bioclipse and a few more. This allows me see the latest blog items on these topics. Often, the point to Asian blogs, mostly Chinese and Japanese, which I mostly find hard to read.