Egon has just posted download statistics for Jmol to the users list. I suspect Jmol has been embedded in 100s, if not 1000s (or even 10Ks worth) of journal pages. I also suspect that there must be a very wide spread of versions in that embedding, possibly going back to Jmol 10 and even earlier. My experience is that Jmol has excellent backward compatibility, and that there is a high probability that the most recent Jmol is likely to work with many of these "legacy" sites.
However, all the journals where Jmol is embedded have no sensible mechanism of any kind to "update" the Jmol on their servers, if they should wish to do so. The advantages would be that even old pages (ie 5+ years old?) would gain new features (we assume nothing breaks, perhaps a dangerous assumption?). I am having difficulty envisaging any sensible update mechanism which could be implemented, but at very least, I wonder whether Jmol could have some sort of alerting mechanism indicating what the version being used is vs what the latest released version might be? I agree such an alert is not so much for the benefit of the reader, but of the administrator who manages the relevant page. Much modern software does this, and some even highly automates the process of updating itself (armed of course with suitable authentication). I dont think those mechanisms could be applied to eg Web servers, but perhaps someone might know of any developments in this area? Has anyone actively maintained any sort of list which details what features might have been once supported, but no longer work at all? -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/rzepa.xrdf (FOAF) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK. (Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email. If expected reply not received, please phone/fax). ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Jmol-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jmol-developers
