Because I was struggling hard with default values for cdk.interfaces fields, I did not have time to write up the Bug Squash Party report for day 3 (see also day 1 and day 2). But here it is. Day 3 Kai worked hard on getting the cdk.interfaces API cleaned up, as agreed upon earlier. Christian added a test for the RMSD calculator (see getAllAtomRMSD()), and cleaned up his code a bit.
Martin Szugat reported that a beta for BioJava 1.5 has been released. New features include: a new biojavax package with extension on the basic functionlity, such as the RichSequence.IOTools and the RichSequence object; a genetic algorithm library; features that allow manipulation of 3D structure files and objects; and non-HMM implementations of the NW and SW alignment algorithms.
Trepalin et al. published in Molecules the article A Java Chemical Structure Editor Supporting the Modular Chemical Descriptor Language (MCDL) (open access PDF). The applet is about 250kB (though the article mentions 200kB) in size and downloadable from the MCDL project on SourceForge (license: Public Domain). The article compares the applet with the JChemPaint applet and notes that their applet is much smaller.
Bling! Bling!. Mark Wielaard announced the GNU Classpath 0.92 release, with the following changes: an alternative awt peer implementation based on Escher that uses the X protocol directly. Various ImageIO providers for png, gif and bmp images. Support for reading and writing midi files and reading .au and .wav files have been added. Various tools and support classes have been added for jar, native2ascii, serialver, keytool, jarsigner.
Recently, a second beta of Java 6 was released, which triggered a patch for the Debian java-package package. It was a Bioclipse bug report today, however, which made me patch my java-package setup and install the beta. So, next thing was to try to get the CDK compile with the Java 6 beta.
Classpath 0.91 is released with 1.45 million lines of code and with 98.96% coverage of Java 1.4.2, and 99.82% of java.swing. Or, as Dave calls it: 0.91 rocks! JChemPaint runs again (they fixed the XML parsing problem), and Jmol still runs , but slow. I also tested Taverna which now also starts up, but has an XML parsing error too: Exception occured whilst loading RDFS!
This weekend I continued my work on getting the CDK and Jmol run with free, open source JVMs. Really, a lot works fine, as reported earlier in this blog: JChemPaint works and Jmol almost works (see the Classpath’s FreeSwingTestApps wiki page), and well over 95% of the CDK JUnit tests run without trouble too. So it comes down to identifying what does not run properly, and file bugs for this. For example, 26101 and 26108.
Because I am still looking forward to testing CDK against the latest Classpath 0.20, I downloaded cacao 0.94-1 for Debian sid, then tried to compile CDK with it: JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/cacao ant -Dbuild.compiler=gcj clean test-all But that hangs at some point with zero load. I have no idea what is going on there.
While waiting for a Dragon calculation to finish (it does not work for molecules with more than 300 atoms!), I updated CDK’s build.xml to support gjdoc. The build script is now able to compile the custom doclets we use for creating the src/*.javafiles and others from the Java source files. And using gij I could also run CDK’s 1688 JUnit tests!
I drop in on the #classpath channel of freenode.net IRC network, where the #cdk channel runs too. The #classpath channel is for the Classpath project which is developing the free Java libraries used by most open source virtual machines. A Slashdot.org item was mentioned “Java Is So 90s”. It lead to a funny discussion about what that would make C/C++ and Fortran.