Programming with MolTalk

http://www.moltalk.org

MolTalk is programmed in Objective-C and comes in two different forms:

• libmoltalk (I), a library, which can deal with structural information as stored in PDB files and maps this information to object-space.
• MolTalk (II), the Smalltalk interpreter used as a front-end to libmoltalk.

Features of MolTalk:

• provides facility to easily load a PDB structure into memory
• creates objects to represent structure/chain/residue/atom hierarchy of PDB formatted files
• makes the correct associations between these objects
• provides an user-friendly interface to access all objects through object messaging
• contains a number of algorithms to modify structures

For rapid software development, users might start working with the scripting language as implemented in the MolTalk front-end. This scripting language has some advantages over compiled code: you do not need to know about C and Objective-C programming (and the compiler suite GCC); the Smalltalk language is learnt very fast. Using one of the provided examples as a starting point, it is easy to write his/her own script and launch the interpreter on it. Execution speed is acceptable for most applications.

For demanding applications where execution speed is critical, there is the possibility to program code directly in Objective-C and link with libmoltalk. With reasonable effort it is possible to port scripts written in Smalltalk to Objective-C and compile them.

The rich set of classes and their methods makes MolTalk a key component in Structural Bioinformatics software development. MolTalk comes with the free GNU public licence allowing everybody to extend the library and adapt to his needs. Further, the licence allows the library to be distributed by everyone.