A structural editor for web-based molecule and reaction entry is amongst the most important requirements for the Java Tools project. We have consequently focused our energies on developing a Java-based molecule and reaction editor over the past two and a half months. Unlike previous versions of Grins and xvgrins, we have altered the user interface considerably to make it more standard with commonly-used professional molecular editors. While xvgrins has a lot of clever built-in features, it was felt that most of these were not used by the majority of users who are in many cases sophisticated users of programs like ChemDraw. A pre-release alpha of the work is currently on exhibit at the computers. We welcome you to try it out, and let us know your suggestions for the same. The following are some of the current capabilities of the applet:

• Java Grins lets you sketch reactions and molecules and returns back SMILES for the same. It also lets you do the reverse given a SMILES string.
• It currently uses a server application to communicate with the Daylight server and other applications.
• It includes selection capabilities for molecules and portions thereof.
• It has a set of user-alterable templates. By user-alterable we mean that the templates are a set of tdt's in a standard directory on the server and can be changed by simply altering the files and structures in the standard directory.
• The current version also has no authentication or security included. The final release version will contain the same.
• The current version has limited Thor database lookup capabilities and a password storage capability.
• The current version also uses the depict toolkit capabilities of the server for depiction from SMILES strings.