[meltsim] ANNOUNCE: 2.0 beta release!

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Fellow melters,

A lot of work has been done in recent months porting MeltSim from the 
Windows/GUI environment to Unix/CLI (command line), and I'm happy to say that a 
public release is almost ready.  While this port may seem like taking a step 
backwards to some (by eliminating the desktop GUI), there are some distinct 
advantages to doing this:

   - Placement of MeltSim into a pipeline or workflow
   - Execution of MeltSim on a cluster or supercomputer
   - Creation of a Web interface for MeltSim

The port of MeltSim involved the following:

   - Translation from Delphi/Pascal to full ANSI C99 with a CLI
   - Inclusion of the "newer" 1998 empirical parameters***
   - Use of more descriptive (and all lowercase) variable names
   - Splitting the functions up into separate .c and .h files
   - Addition of a Tm calculation function+++ and a CLI progress bar
   - A couple bugs have also been found and fixed.

***The 1995 parameters are still available (see the README file).
+++The Windows version had the Tm function in the "Graph" tool.

Note that the Graph tool won't be ported.  I prefer to use gnuplot these days.

I hope to port and update the "Compile" tool someday, but there are now many 
free tools that pretty much do the same thing.

I'm making this announcement only on the MeltSim mailing list for now, since 
this is a beta release (numbered 1.99.0, meaning 2.0-beta1, as commonly done 
with open-source projects), and I would like you guys to try it and test it 
first.  It's available here:

   ftp://ftp.bioinformatics.org/pub/meltsim/meltsim-1.99.0.tar.gz

Please let me know what you think and if you encounter any problems.

And expect an announcement shortly about a Web interface!

Cheers,
Jeff
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J.W. Bizzaro
Bioinformatics Organization, Inc. (Bioinformatics.Org)
E-mail: jeff at bioinformatics.org
Phone:  +1 508 890 8600
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