Experimental Tool Distribution Method

An ​experimental tools page is available for releasing tools that are not part of the standard Chimera distribution. The page is implemented as a CGI script. When given no arguments (such as when a user visiting for the first time), the script generates an HTML file with a list of hyperlinks to available tools. Clicking on a tool hyperlink causes the CGI script to return a chimerax file which the user's browser should dispatch to a locally installed copy of Chimera. When Chimera receives the file, it asks the user whether to execute it. If the user answers "yes", the selected tool is installed in a MyTools directory in the same location as the user's Chimera preferences file. An entry for MyTools is also added to the tool directory list so that the tool is available both immediately in the same Chimera session as well as in future sessions.

The CGI script and available tools are kept in plato:/usr/local/projects/chimera/www/data/tools. Neither the script nor the tools are under revision control. To add a new tool, simply copy the Chimera tool directory into this directory. In addition to the standard ChimeraExtension.py and __init__.py files, there must be an INFO file, whose contents look like:

Name: MapSums
Version: 0.1
Description: tool for reporting density sums near atoms

This information is used by the CGI script to generate the HTML table of contents and the chimerax script. The Version number should be convertible using Python's float function; if not, tool installation will fail.