JavaGrins Frequently Asked Questions

Q. Why havent you used JFC for JavaGrins?
A. JFC is not currently included as part of either Netscape or Internet Explorer. Using it will imply asking our customers to include it in every browser on their clients. While this is easy for small companies, large organizations may find this unacceptable. The other alternative, downloading it from a server, is impractical given the size of the JFC classes (a few Megs). Doing the same with IFC is a little more practical since the IFC classes are only a few 100k

Q. Do you plan to include SMARTs in JavaGrins?
A. Yes in future releases

Q. Do you plan to support Internet Explorer?
A. Yes  in release 4.62

Q. Does JavaGrins generate Unique SMILES?
A. Yes, it does.

Q. Is JavaGrins a Bean?
A. No. While converting it into a bean is no big deal, supplying a bean introduces another whole level of support for us. If the idea is to attain easy usability for a component, this can already be done very easily with LiveConnect, which enables communication between JavaGrins and any other LiveConnect
enabled element (a Java applet, JavaScript, or a plugin on a web page). From a support perspective, this is extremely easy, since LiveConnect has extensive documentation and is well debugged and tested on several browsers. It is furthermore forward compatible with new technologies such as XML.

Q. Do you plan to migrate JavaGrins to JFC?
A. Yes. However we need browsers to include JFC as part of their core Java implementations before we can do that.

Q. Regarding applet download times, how does JavaGrins compare?
A. In terms of size JavaGrins is around 150k. This compares well with the the ChemSymphony sketcher which appears to be ~500k and the ACD sketcher which appears to be ~400k.

Q. Can we expect applet startup time to decrease in future versions?
A. Probably.

Q. Can we expect applet sizes to decrease?
A. Probably not, as more functionality is added.

Q. Can we expect performance to get faster?
A. Yes, especially since the Java runtime implementors are working with new technologies to address this problem.

Q. Can we expect JVM startup time to decrease in the future?
A. A definite yes. The beta version of Netscape 4.5 already has a JVM that starts up much faster than the current version.