[Cdk-jchempaint] Javascript JCP

[gilleain t. <gil...@gm...>]

Hi,

Apologies for the cross-post, but I'm not sure how many people are on the
JCP-devel list.

Anyway, it's clear that Java Applet's days are numbered. There are a number
of options here:

1) Abandon JCP - there are other JS chemical editors out there!
2) Port (cross-compile? transpile?) JCP to Javascript
3) Re-write in JS

I'm not a fan of option 1) naturally. So I'm wondering if anyone has any
advice on 2) or 3). I note this SO question from Rich Apodaca:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/440302/how-to-cross-compile-java-source-code-to-javascript

which has led me to various options:

- GWT (google's toolkit)
- Kotlin (JVM language)
- JSweet (uses Typescript)
- Java2Javascript (used by Jmol)

However, I'm sure there are others. I will try and experiment with some of
these - starting with JSweet - and will put the results on github. What I'm
likely to try is just some simple vector editing written in Java and
cross-compiled to JS.

One initial problem is that to get everything into the browser, you have to
cross-compile all the code (including CDK code) and all dependencies to JS.
Not sure how possible that could be. An alternative might be to have a thin
JS client with the view model and a servlet maintaining the domain model.

Let me know if you have other ideas, or forsee any problems..

Gilleain