One, two, three, MD

Some exciting developments over at the Molecular Workbench (MW) blog run by MW author Charles Xie. I have several blog posts on MW, but it was necessary to install MW to check it out for yourself. Now it is possible to embed a MW applet in web pages (and blog posts!) like the one here (just push the play button!):


I think this is a big step forward for MW. While it is easy to download and install MW, it still removed MW a few clicks from the user and made it "appear to be yet another kind of annoying pop-up" and Charles notes.

It's very easy to do this. The screencast below shows how I made the simulation above in MW. Note that it literally takes one minute (and 5 seconds).



When you hit save you get two files: md.cml and md$0.mml. I transferred these to my web server where I had also put the MW applet (mwapplet.jar).

The html code is

<applet code="org.concord.modeler.MwApplet" archive="mwapplet.jar" height="300" width="100%"><param name="script" value="page:0:import md.cml"></applet>

To include it in a blog, where mwapplet.jar is not installed, add the server address in front of mwapplet.jar and md.cml, e.g. http://myserver.edu/md.cml.