Synchronous communication of molecular and electronic structure information in a distributed computing environment

Abstract

Today, most graphics applications run as local stand-alone programs with transient construction of the data structures used to represent the graphics data. A number of approaches to communicate molecular graphics data over the World Wide Web based on standardized file formats which can be recognized by Web browsers or helper applications have been reported. In a world where most research groups are engaged in remote collaboration, the lack of the possibility of bidirectional synchronous communication is difficult to accept.

In this work, we will present a new data communication paradigm using a portable data structure which is based on an underlying object-oriented molecular graphics library, which represents the basis for a Web based collaborative engineering environment allowing the sharing of windows containing two- and three-dimensional information in real time.