Molecular Workbench

1. What is the Molecular Workbench?
   
   
2. What are the system requirements?
   
   
3. Why does it sometimes take a long time to launch an activity, and a short time for other activities?
   
   
4. How can I run the Molecular Workbench without using Java Web Start?
   
   

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1. What is the Molecular Workbench?

The Molecular Workbench is a piece of modeling software that can model various systems related to physics, chemistry, and biology. The models are supported by a set of molecular dynamics engines and a quantum mechanics engine under development. The Molecular Workbench also delivers an integrated authoring environment (Word for Molecules!) which allows the user to construct models, author activities with a variety of supported components (such as controllers, graphs, text boxes, multiple choice questions, etc.), and deploy them to the Web.

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2. What are the system requirements?

The Molecular Workbench is written in Java, so any system that can run Java version 1.4.2 or greater should be able to run our software. Typical systems that have this capability are: Windows 98 through XP, Macintosh OS X, and Linux. However, Molecular Workbench runs slowly on computers older than five years old and early Mac OS X versions.

Please Note: If you are behind a proxy server that requires NTLM authentification, you will need Java version 1.4.2-02 or greater.

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3. Why does it sometimes take a long time to launch an activity, and a short time for other activities?

The first time you click on a web page link to launch an activity, a check is done to see if you have the necessary software or an outdated version of the software. If so, then a new version of the software will be downloaded causing a longer wait time before the activity shows up on the screen.

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4. How can I run the Molecular Workbench without using Java Web Start?

Download the file workbench.jar (URL: http://mw.concord.org/modeler/lib/workbench.jar) on your computer. If you double-click on this file, Molecular Workbench will open to its default home page. Then you can browse available models by clicking on links found at that page.

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