[cmview-devel] PyMol vs. Jmol?

Henning Stehr stehr at molgen.mpg.de
Mon Apr 26 09:14:50 EDT 2010


Hi Dan,

CMView is still using PyMol for 3D visualization.
It would be some effort but not impossible to integrate with JMol.
To good thing is that the code for communication with PyMol is
encapsulated in the class cmview.PyMolAdaptor.
The bad thing is that this class was not designed to be easily
adaptable to other viewers. So you would have to
see how much effort it would be.

We had at some point the idea to eventually replace PyMol with JMol.
The advantages I see are:
- would make CMView more or less pure java based
- would allow tighter integration and bidirectional communication
- would be easier to package and install (maybe even using Java web start)

But, as Michael said, at the moment we don't plan to do anything like
this. The main reasons I see for sticking
with PyMol (apart from the obvious effort of writing the adapter class) are:
- PyMol is prettier
- PyMol is more feature rich
- PyMol can 3D ;)

Another alternative by the way would be to use JyMol which is a Java
API to the PyMol visualization engine.

We'll put it on the list for CMView 3.0 :)

Henning

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 2:39 PM, Dan Bolser <dan.bolser at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is CMView still tied to PyMol?
>
> Would it be easy to integrate with Jmol?
>
>
> Cheers,
> Dan.
>
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