Abstract
PubChem is an important public, Web-based information source for chemical and bioactivity information. In order to provide convenient structure search methods on compounds stored in this database, one mandatory component is a Web-based drawing tool for interactive sketching of chemical query structures. Web-enabled chemical structure sketchers are not new, being in existence for years; however, solutions available rely on complex technology like Java applets or platform-dependent plug-ins. Due to general policy and support incident rate considerations, Java-based or platform-specific sketchers cannot be deployed as a part of public NCBI Web services. Our solution: a chemical structure sketching tool based exclusively on CGI server processing, client-side JavaScript functions, and image sequence streaming. The PubChem structure editor does not require the presence of any specific runtime support libraries or browser configurations on the client. It is completely platform-independent and verified to work on all major Web browsers, including older ones without support for Web2.0 JavaScript objects.
Highlights
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov is widely known for its cluster of literature, biology, genomics, and chemistry databases which are freely accessible on the Web [1]
From experience gained in more than a decade of operation, NCBI has developed a set of principles concerning what kind of client-side technology can be deployed as a part of its Web services
Like the approach pioneered by in internal CIBA project[12] and taken up, according to one of the reviewers as a direct result of seeing the CIBA prototype, by Daylight Grins http:// www.daylight.com/daycgi/testgrins, we considered to move all the chemical structure processing functions of a
Summary
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov is widely known for its cluster of literature, biology, genomics, and chemistry databases which are freely accessible on the Web [1]. Structure editor onto a server CGI, and to send a dynamically generated sequence of images with the evolving structure back to the client browser, but, unlike Daylight Grins, the editor behaves much like an interactive application with mouse movements being tracked as they are being made, rather than requiring the user click on an image to register their action. This type of software configuration would not require any applets or plug-ins on the client and appeared to be feasible on any browser supporting the display of images and basic JavaScript functions. A segmentation of the drawing area into panels in order to further reduce the amount of data sent to the client was considered, but not deemed necessary after these initial calculations
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