One of the most important decisions we faced in the re-launch of Chempedia was how to deploy it. Although deployment tends not to get the attention that Web application development gets, it’s every bit as important in determining how the fruits of your labors are perceived by end users. Heroku is a Rails application deployment platform that’s unique for its laser focus on scalability and ease of use.
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In the last few days I’ve been part of some interesting discussions around the question of whether pasting SMILES (or InChI) strings into text fields the sign of bad interface design. Could it be that this practice actually rises to the level of an antipattern?
What Alex is talking about is the ongoing revolution in information distribution that’s slowly making its presence known in scientific publication. And he’s right on target in identifying this transformation’s rate-limiting step: the academic rewards system.
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Developing a Web application is one thing but deploying it is quite another - and not in a good way. If you’ve ever had to install, configure and maintain a production server from scratch, you may know the job as being both tedious and thankless. That’s why Metamolecular is doing something different for the re-launch Chempedia. Rather than provisioning a server from scratch, as we’ve done with previous applications, we’re giving Heroku a shot.
If you’ve been thinking about entering the ChemWriter Contest, today’s the last day to enter. The prize: one ChemWriter domain license. Entering is simple: just write one paragraph on your most important requirement for a chemical structure editor. No mention of ChemWriter is necessary - we’re really just interested in your most important requirement. Include a link to the contest home page.
Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) is a Web-based platform for drug discovery collaboration. It’s one of the few examples of a Web-based tool accessible by the public and designed to integrate into the daily workflow of biology/chemistry teams. Recently, CDD held its 3rd Annual Community Meeting, and Barry Bunin, CDD’s founder, forwarded me a link to a writeup of the event. CDD is interesting at a number of levels.
[Flash Content Scrubbed] At last night’s SDRuby meeting, Blake Mizerany gave an excellent overview of Heroku. The platform’s dead-simple deployment and scaling features make this one well worth checking out. Also, small applications can be hosted for free. The above screencast by Remi Taylor shows how to get started.
One of the problems with working with JSON is getting a nice browser view with syntax highlighting and collapsible elements, as is possible with XML. Over at the Metamolecular Products Blog is an example of how Chemcaster enables you to directly view JSON representations of resources in your browser with syntax highlighting.
Over at elnblog.com, Simon Coles raises some intriguing questions about the future of “ELN” (Electronic Laboratory Notebook) software. In particular, he questions the utility of the term “ELN” itself.
