I've been thinking about this ever since I wrote/posted my crystal structure patch a few months ago... At that time I decided to copy/adapt Jmol.java to JCryst.java... But I think Jmol should better be modularized... i.e. that is should support plugins (or something like that...)
The plugin would be activated if a file contains certain information, and the
plugins make the menu items pointing to functionality in that plugin...
We would have an animation plugin, a vibration mode analyzer plugin, a crystal
plugin...
I certainly like the idea of plugins in general. (I'm not commenting on whether JCryst should be a plugin - although I certainly want the functionality somewhere).
It seems to me that the W3C or someone is going to have to come up with plugins sometime. We used to have mime types and helpers which worked fine but the point of that seems to have got lost. So how do we add program functionality? Either we have to know that the plugin is necessary and the address to download it from or the browser has to know about certain plugins. How do browsers know to download Chime? or Adobe SVG?
Jmol has a role to act as a plugin manager for molecular science. Someone reads a file which has a certain functionality in it. That might be triggered by XML namespaces or possibly by processing instructions. Jmol then has to have a plugin name server somewhere - maybe this is set in a configurations file. The plugin nameserver could then offer the user one of more plugins which would manage that functionality.
This may seem OTT, but it can be seen as a considerable advantage over some existing molecular software. This would mean that we could offer Jmol to a user and they wouldn't need to have to know what the different plugins were and how to install them.
P
------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SF.net Giveback Program. SourceForge.net hosts over 70,000 Open Source Projects. See the people who have HELPED US provide better services: Click here: http://sourceforge.net/supporters.php _______________________________________________ Jmol-developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jmol-developers
