Re: [Open Babel] openbabel web service

[Craig A. J. <cj...@em...>]

One more thing...

On 4/13/10 9:48 AM, Craig A. James wrote:
> On 4/13/10 5:02 AM, Christian Meisenbichler wrote:
>> Is someone interested in creating an openbabel web service?
>>
>> Let me explain what I mean by that. I Just recently got convinced by
>> the idea of software as a service and the practical elegance of
>> knitting together various parts of software by http requests.
>> Openbabel as a converter tool would just be perfect for such a
>> service.
>>
>> The service would accept a http post request with the file to convert
>> as post data. The source and target file format is encoded in the URI
>> and the request returns the converted file.
>>
>> As there are already python bindings, a simple python http request
>> handler that provides this service is something I would quite like to
>> implement. Question is if there is someone who would be interested to
>> host such a service? Maybe even as a part of the open babel project?
>>
>> Motivation of course is that one sometimes wants to use openbabel
>> functionality but it is for some reason impossible or impractical to
>> install it or deal with the dependencies. In such an situation the
>> script or application must only be able to issue an http request. I
>> think thats utterly elegant.
>>
>> What do you think?
>
> I can probably provide the hosting. We're already doing a little bit of
> this with http://depict.emolecules.com/, which is just a very thin
> front-end for OpenBabels -gen2D service, combined with our GIF
> generator. We are also hosting http://www.opensmiles.org/.
>
> It doesn't have to be exclusive either, it would be nice if there were
> "mirror" sites that all ran one set of code from the SVN or git repository.

By the way, we recently added InChI to the list of formats you can use.  For example...

http://depict.emolecules.com/cgi-bin/mymol/depict.cgi?smiles=InChI%3D1S%2FC7H8N2%2Fc8-7%289%296-4-2-1-3-5-6%2Fh1-5H,%28H3,8,9%29&width=400&height=400&colorscheme=cow&format=gif

Craig