Hi, I am working with Randy on this, and I think we have a web service type solution that will work using your suggestions. The one problem that remains is killing chimera after a request. The webdata facility is targeted to run on a client's machine where a user quits chimera, but we will be running it on the server. I tried adding the 'stop' command at the end of the chimerax file, but I received an error from chimera and it continued to run. Same story for 'sys.exit()' Running the chimera_send script a second time only opens a new instance of chimera which also remains open. Is there a way to attach chimera_send to an existing process of chimera, or have chimera quit at the end of a chimera_send call? Thanks, Charlie
-----Original Message----- From: chimera-users-bounces@cgl.ucsf.edu [mailto:chimera-users-bounces@cgl.ucsf.edu] On Behalf Of Thomas Goddard Sent: Monday, May 24, 2004 6:20 PM To: heiland@indiana.edju Cc: chimera-users@cgl.ucsf.edu Subject: [Chimera-users] non-GUI use of Chimera
Hi Randy,
If I understand correctly you want to be able to type some Chimera Python code or Chimera commands to a web browser, those get sent to the web server which sends them to Chimera running on the web server machine. Then you capture the Chimera image and send it back to the web browser.
I believe this can be done using the Chimera "Web Data" facility. This allows programs to send commands to Chimera. The intended use is for displaying models in Chimera when the user clicks a link in a web browser. It works by having the *.chimerax file associated with the link lauch helper application <chimera-install-location>/bin/chimera_send. The same mechanism allows any program to send commands to Chimera. The Chimera User's Guide describes this under Tools/Web Browser Configuration. Here's a URL:
http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/1.1951/docs/ContributedSoftware/webdata/ chimerax.html
What you might do is have your web server create an appropriate *.chimerax that executes the user's commands and then prints the Chimera graphics window to a file. The web server than sends the image (jpg) to the web client. There is a bunch of somewhat tricky glue to make this work. As previous posts mentioned, Chimera will need to pop up windows on some screen to render an image. For the web server to know when Chimera has finished making an image, the *.chimerax file might end in a command that writes to some secondary status file after the image file is written. That will tell the web server that the image is ready.
We haven't tried this. And there are other pitfalls, like you are likely to run into trouble if the web server starts 2 instances of Chimera and then tries to dispatch commands with the chimera_send program.
Please let me know if you get this to work. Feel free to send additional questions.
Tom _______________________________________________ Chimera-users mailing list Chimera-users@cgl.ucsf.edu http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/mailman/listinfo/chimera-users