Fermentable Code

It's been almost two years in the making, but OriginDB is finally nearing a 1.0 release. I really want to get something out the door, so I'm going to make this a stable preview release. What this means is that there are still some features that aren't implemented, but something needs to be released.

This last semester I've had lots of help from my senior design time (Brian and Travis) here at Tech. The plan was to release at the end of the semester, but stuff happened and we still had some major features not implemented. I've been able to finish those up the past couple of days and I'm pretty sure I can call what we have now stable.

The major features that are missing are:

• Compound Editor cleaning
  There is a button in the compound editor that is meant to "clean" the current compound (i.e. put it in a pretty geometric form), but this does not work at all. It turned out to be way harder than expected, and I'll blog about that later
• Searching for user created pathways in the database
  One feature we wanted was a way to search / browse user created pathways that have been saved to the database. Right now you can save pathways to the database, but there's no way to find them again. Hopefully this will be implemented in the next few weeks, however.
• Optimized server
  We had also planned to optimize the server so that we could reduce the number of requests. This would also allow a progress bar to be implemented. This is probably the most ambitious future goal and might never be implemented.

And we also have a couple of bugs that won't be fixed before the 1.0 release, but I feel like it's better to get something out there for people to use.

• On Vista and Windows 7, if you open PubChem the whole program crashes.
  This is probably the most important bug to fix. I'll be looking into it a little before the release, but I doubt I'll find the problem.
• And there is a database error that randomly appears
  I have absolutely no idea why this is happening. If you repeat the request it works fine, but it just fails... randomly. This one is very frustrating.

Finally, all I have left to do is create an installer. We have a wonderful getting started guide, thanks to Brian and Travis, and we have a partially complete user's manual. In the coming weeks the user's manual should be finished up, but for now, the getting started guide should be plenty.

Hopefully in the next day or so it will be out. Keep an eye on the download page!