Platform Brawl

Issues pertinent to changes for future versions of Daylight software will be discussed here. Suggestions are welcome.

• New platforms:
  • Solaris 8
  • Linux clusters: Many companies have now taken to running their servers on clusters of Linux computers on rackmounts. Very popular among these are the Beowulf clusters. To extend Daylight spftware to run on clusters we have to deal with licensing issues
  • Alternative versions of Linux
    • Debian Linux : high stability
    • SuSE Linux
    We need to watch the demand for these distributions before deciding to support them. RedHat, the majority distribution has been easily supportable till now.
  • RedHat 7.0: Issues involved
    • gcc 2.96
    • system patches
    Given the support issues involved with these issues while we know that Daylight runs perfectly well on altered RedHat 7.0, we will not be announcing support for Daylight on RedHat 7.0. RedHat 7.1 (out on beta now) is based on the new SMP 2.4 Linux kernel. As usual, we will test its stability before deciding to support the same.
  • NT toolkits
  • OSX port: Perhaps after a year
    • Watch OS API's stabilize
    • Produce a superior objects for graphical app development environment in OSX, so as to create a need for the port
• More changes to the Depict toolkit
  • Ability to collapse groups e.g. CH2-NH2-OAc
  • Orient molecules right
  • Have a SMARTS based alignment depiction routine
  • More output formats e.g. VML, SVG
  • Kekule depiction mode
• A depiction applet that can invoke JavaScript when an atom in a depicted molecule is clicked on.
• Alter JavaGrins to include graphical SMIRKS editing capability
• Include XML utilites for Daylight
  • tdt2xml, xml2tdt
  • have smi2gif accept XML data as input for atoms w. coordinates
  By doing so we can capitalize on XML based utilities such as XML tree viewers and XML editors
• Feel free to email me any other changes you'd like to see