[Jmol-developers] Jmol/JSmol SourceForge project integration

[Robert H. <ha...@st...>]

Jmol Developers,

Not sure if you are on this list you still have any interest in Jmol, but I
hope some of you do.

Well, it's done. The JSmol sourceforge project at
https://sourceforge.net/p/jsmol is now no longer needed. I've placed all
the files that were in that project into the /unused/ folder there. This is
so that we still can track the histories of the files if we need to. But
probably that will not be necessary.

This past week I totally overhauled the way the transpiler works. For the
past 10 years, the transpiler that was being used for Jmol only worked in a
very old version of Eclipse "Juno" from (I think) 2013. This has been an
enormous pain. For at least eight years I have avoided doing anything with
this old transpiler.

I finally took the step to revisit the prototype "java2script 4.2" code
from 2013, and I realized that it was not so bad and that would be possible
to add that code to the SwingJS transpiler plugin as an alternative
transpiler option.

That has worked perfectly. The new plugin is j2s.core_5.0.1.jar, at
https://github.com/BobHanson/java2script/tree/master/sources/net.sf.j2s.core

And, as a bonus, we now can adapt the legacy 4.2 transpiler, which is only
ever to be used with Jmol anyway, to future needs. The first thing I did
was move it up to Java 8 (Though it still only recognizes Java 6 syntax.)
One of the things I did was to give it a way to deliver JavaScript code
ready for running directly into the site/ directory. This was huge, because
previously there were a series of ANT tasks that had to be run to do all
sorts of minor tweaking of that output before one could test in JavaScript.

But now, it's very clean and simple. You modify Java code for Jmol, save
the .java file, and open your browser to see how it runs in JavaScript.
Your changes are instantly there. Full integration. The way it should be.
Hooray!

And then I realized that we didn't need the JSmol project at all.
Originally, the idea was to do all the transpiling in this separate
project, just using the code that relates to the applet. But now this is
not necessary. Once I got the transpiler doing what the ANT tasks were
doing (and I was able to fix the various bugs in the 4.2 transpiler that
were causing these problems in the first place), I realized that the only
thing the JSmol project was doing (yesterday) was to add some more files.
So I figured I would just put those files in the Jmol project (into
site-resources/ and site-resources-zip). That's all checked in now.

Happy to report that that went smoothly, and I was able to fix a few more
bugs while at it.

So, in short, the Jmol project is alive and well at SourceForge, now using
the same transpiler plugin as SwingJS. Just the two projects - Jmol, on
SourceForge, and java2script on GitHub. (OK, there's also the Jmol-SwingJS
GitHub project, that's true.) No old versions of Eclipse are necessary. So
long, Luna!! There's just the one plugin.

And my life is way easier. Retirement (from teaching) is just terrific. The
bicycling season is just about over here; looks like I will hit 4000 km
this year.

Drop me a line and tell me how you are doing.

Bob

-- 
Robert M. Hanson
Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus
St. Olaf College
Northfield, MN
http://www.stolaf.edu/people/hansonr


If nature does not answer first what we want,
it is better to take what answer we get.

-- Josiah Willard Gibbs, Lecture XXX, Monday, February 5, 1900

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