An older version of Jacob

Hello! We plan to upgrade MarvinSketch from 5.4 to the latest one. Our project uses an old version of Jacob which was fine for old MarvinSketch, and unfortunately we cannot upgrade Jacob. So we are not sure whether it is safe to use the latest MarvinSketch with an old version of Jacob. What should we check / test to be sure that everything works? Thanks!

Hi,

in Marvin we use Jacob to access the registry for OLE settings on the Preferences panel of MarvinSketch, and for OLE and EMF copy. I think these should be tested from Marvin.

In Marvin jacob is used in the following way: Marvin locates the native jar files in its codebase, and copies the dlls into the home directory of the user, and loads its natives from there, and the jacob jar from its classpath. The classpath is defined in the manifest.mf of MarvinBeans.jar.

I hope this helps to find the possible problems.

Regards,
Istvan 

Hello! Thanks for your reply. We did some testing of our embedded MarvinSketch with respect to Jacob 1.10, and it's not clear, whether it works correctly. The most notable issues are:

 1) Export to EMF gives an empty file;

 2) Copy to Office works (I believe as expected), when I try to paste the copied object back to MarvinSketch, it pops up a selection of possible formats to recognize the chemical structure but none of them actually works (nothing is imported due to various exceptions).

Is this an indication that Jacob 1.10 is too old and cannot replace 1.15 that is bundled with MarvinSketch? Maybe you could provide some hints on further testing? Thanks!

Hi,

First of all sorry for the late reply, we had a lot of work to do to prepare ourselves to our User Group Meeting, and I could not managed to have enough time to check this fully until now.

Since these are the functionalities that relies on the jacob library, yes this means that the 1.10.1 version is not enough for these Marvin functionalities.

What I also have noticed when I have replaced the jacob library with the older version is that the OLE setting panel on the Prefreneces dialog is not operating as expected, and when you select a structure and then do a copy as operation, the Marvin OLE format is not there, so the OLE copy in not working at all.

Will this be a problem for you, which harms the application seriously? In this case, I check what we can do to avoid this jar conflict, or at least workaround it.

Regards,
Istvan 

Hello, and thanks a lot for this valuable information! Besides MarvinSketch, we're also upgrading some other libraries to enable support for x64, and they require a fresh version of Jacob, so I hope the final decision will be to upgrade Jacob to the latest version. I believe, using Jacob 1.17 would not be a problem with MarvinSketch, am I right? Thanks again!

Vitaly

That is a good question, I hope so too, but I will test it shortly and get back to you with my results.

Great, I could also mention that, surely, we are now working on integrating MarvinSketch 6.

Hi Vitaly,

I would like to inform you gladly, that the 1.17 version of the Jacob library have passed our tests, and will be included in the 6.2 version of MarvinBeans.

Regards,
Istvan 

Hi Istvan,

Great news, I think we'll be upgrading soon. Thanks!

Vitaly