Today sees the 2.2 release of Instant JChem (IJC) being pushed out the door. IJC is an advanced out-of-the-box tool that allows scientists to create, manage, and analyze chemical structures and their data. Essentially, it makes the chemical spreadsheet superfluous. IJC is a desktop application that provides a convenient and straightforward approach to the analysis of chemical and biological data. It is a database-centric environment that supports query and sorting functionality, handling large volumes of data, such as hundreds of thousands of structures at the same time.

For a birds-eye-view of what all that means, here's the main window, showing chemical structure search interfaces, as well as cool advanced features such as animation options:

In addition to bug fixes, the 2.2 release introduces the following features:

• form based query
• redesigned query builder
• federated search allowing structure queries to be run across multiple data trees
• security can be configured against LDAP
• basic form printing
• views, list and queries can be directly shared between users
• direct export to Excel (structures as images)

Detailed release notes, with descriptions of the new features, can be found here .

A full set of updated user documentation is provided here . In addition, note that IJC publishes a set of APIs, together with tutorials that explain how to create IJC plugins. Getting Started with Extending IJC provides a starting point for these activities.

In conclusion, IJC can now be run using Java Web Start, which avoids the need for installing. You can do this by using this page, which is also handy if you want to get a quick impression of what the product is all about:

http://www.chemaxon.com/instantjchem-jws/released.html