An Affordable Approach to Interactive Desktop Molecular Modeling

T.E. Ferrin, G.S. Couch, C.C. Huang, E.F. Pettersen, and R. Langridge

Computer Graphics Laboratory
University of California
San Francisco, CA 94143-0446

ABSTRACT

The amazing revolution in computer hardware performance and cost reduction has yet to be realized with computer software. In fact, application software today is often more expensive and less reliable than the hardware. New enhancements in software development techniques such as object oriented programming and interactive graphics-based user interface design may finally be having a significant impact on the time-to-market and reliability of these application programs. We discuss our experiences using one such set of software development tools available on the NeXT workstation and describe the effort required to port our MidasPlus molecular modeling package to the NeXT workstation.

A reprint of this paper is available on request.


tef@cgl.ucsf.edu / October 1990