RESTful Cheminformatics Web Services in PHP and Ruby: Two Chemcaster Clients

Language-specific client libraries are essential ingredients of any Web service. Although it is possible to code directly to an HTTP interface, few things flatten a learning curve more than working at a higher level in a language you know well.

Over at the Metamolecular Products Blog, two clients for Chemcaster have been announced - one written in PHP and the other written in Ruby. (Chemcaster is the cheminformatics Web services platform designed for rapid creation of rich chemistry websites). These clients are the first to enable interaction with the new Chemcaster REST API.

Regardless of your interest in Chemcaster itself, the client libraries may be worth checking out. Chemcaster exposes a RESTful, hypertext-driven API that offers some important advantages over REST-RPC hybrid architecture commonly seen on the Web today. Both libraries illustrate how concise and flexible the underlying code to consume this kind of Web API can be.

And if the idea of simplifying the creation of rich chemistry websites through cheminformatics Web services appeals to you, please feel free to request a Chemcaster testing account.