Duncan Hull offers an interesting commentary on the rapid increase in the number of biologically-oriented databases. He asks whether all of this abundance is leading to nothing more than a bad case of data indigestion, in which data is dumped into write-only “data tombs,” never to be seen again.

The last installment of this series showed how to set up an HTML testing harness for JSpecView. With the preliminaries taken care of, this installment will show how to enhance the user interface. The Goal The live applet shown above illustrates the changes that were made. As you move your mouse cursor into the spectrum area, you’ll see a vertical red line appear and track the movements of the mouse.

Source: Molecule of the Day Rendering: ChemWriter

A quiet revolution is taking place in the way the primary research literature gets reviewed. Like all revolutions in their infancy, this one looks hungry, raggedy and generally not respectable. But that could change rather quickly given the right technology. Research Blogging is a brand new service that aggregates commentary about the peer-reviewed literature appearing on blogs.

The “destandardization” of the GUI has been underway for several years. From Web applications like Picnik to Flash video players to Apple’s iTunes application, users are getting increasingly used to the idea that not every program needs to look like Microsoft Office, and that some of them never should have in the first place. Now, it’s possible to infuse Java Swing applications with the look and feel of this new breed of GUI.

The previous article in this series discussed the construction of an Ant build environment for JSpecView. This article will show how to use Ant to build an HTML harness to test the resulting Applet and jarfile. Availability of Source Code Robert Lancashire, the lead JSpecView developer, has kindly agreed to host the complete source code for this series of tutorials on the JSpecView SourceForge project page.