BALLView

BALLView is an molecular viewer and modeller written in C++ and Qt. It is developed in close collaboration by the
Saarland University and the Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen. It is the graphical frontend to the
BALL library (Biochemical ALgorithms Library) and is especially geared towards the use for biochemistry.
The library has now been developed since more than 10 years and features many, very mature core classes for
dealing with molecular structures.

Version 1.3 marks a considerable milestone for BALL and BALLView due to numerous changes to the visualization architecture
and cross platform support. It now runs equally well on all three major (desktop) OSes: Linux, MacOS X (other Unices should work but are not tested),
and Windows.


BALLView's main features include:

Support of many molecular file formats (PDB, MOL2, HyperChem, ...)

Saving and loading of complete projects (preferences, molecules, ...)

Structure checking and repairing against a fragment database

Fully customizable 3D representations including:
Line, Stick, Ball and Stick, Cartoon and Ribbon, SES, SAS, VdW, ...

POVRay and VRML export

Stereo imaging support (3D glasses ;-)

Implementations of the Amber, Charmm and MMFF94 force fields

Molecular Dynamics and energy minimization capabilities

Electrostatics computation and visualization

Automatic bond order assignment

Secondary structure calculation

SMILE and SMARTS support

Molecular editor

Peptide builder

Fully scriptable via a python interface

A plugin system

Support for the 3DConnexions SpaceNavigator

Editable shortcuts (Not standard for molecular modellers :D)

and many more!

There is already a bunch of features planned for future releases:

Addition of crystallographic datastructures their visualization (added in 1.4.0)

A QSAR module (added in 1.4.0)

Implementation of real-time ray tracing of geometry and volumetric data

Advanced docking algorithms

Residue mutation capabilities

and again many more ;-)

For more information:
See our webpage: http://www.ball-project.org
As well as our wiki and bugtracker at http://ball-trac.bioinf.uni-sb.de
Especially for compiling see: http://ball-trac.bioinf.uni-sb.de/wiki/DevelopmentEnvironment

We welcome any kind of feedback be it constructive criticism, bug reports, packages, patches or simply kudos :-)

[size=1]Important Note: Take a look at the 2.0-pre-alpha-1 release to see realtime raytracing in action ;-)[/size]
Unfortunately due to compiler issues and no stable version of RTFact being released we can only provide a Windows binary :-(. A source release will happen in the future.

Version 1.4.0:
This is a new major release of the BALL library. There are many improvements and bugfixes, including:
- Beginning support for translations
- Support for electron densities and crystal packings
- Improved layout of many dialogs
- NMR data support
- Memory usage improvements
- Improved MOL2 export

Version 2.0-pre-alpha-1:
- VIEW:
* Integrated the RTFact realtime raytracing engine.

Version 1.3.2:
- Buildsystem:
* Fix some issues with CMake
- Core:
* Fix a bug in the SES generator
* Add a safeguard to StructureMapper in order to avoid numeric instabilities
- Python:
* Fix compilation with Sip 4.10

Version 1.3.1:
- Buildsystem:
* Added a CMake based buildsystem
* Fixed autoconf to work with newer distros.
- Core:
* Dramatic speed up of SES triangulation
- Python:
* Fixed the StringHashMap bindings
* Added some missing classes
* Fix compilation with Sip 4.9
- BALLView:
* Minor fixes all over the place