Saturday, January 30, 2010

Publishing Molecular Workbench simulations as applets

For a while I have been asked whether or not an MW simulation can be made to run directly within a browser page instead of a pop-up window. Several collaborators would like to deploy MW simulations within their web portals or delivery systems. For them, embedding a simulation within a web page is desirable. The current way of using the Java Web Start to launch an MW simulation sometimes irritates users as it can appear to be yet another kind of annoying pop-ups.

So I did some work in the past week to make it possible for users to save an MW page as an applet, which can then be deployed anywhere without having to rely on my company's server. This is always good for the integrity of a web site, as no serious web developer wants to depend on other people's servers to be up and running forever.

Here are some demos:








This new mechanism of publishing MW simulations provides an option for people who want to integrate MW simulations with their web applications, if they don't mind the relatively slow loading speed.

4 comments:

Jan Jensen said...

That's great! And I happy to see it now works on Macs.

Is it possible to embed it in a blog post on blogger?

Charles Xie said...

Thanks, Jan. See my blog post on 2/14/2010 for how to embed an MW applet.

Charles Xie said...

Jan, I succeeded in embedding MW applets in my blog. So you should be able to do so on yours as well.

Jan Jensen said...

Yep, it works! Thanks, Jan