Chextile: The simple Chemistry Studying Tool

Inspiration:

The original idea was to develop a tool to aid my friend's gene therapy cancer research at Roswell Park. I quickly found, however, that I was lacking both the hacking skills, and the understanding of molecular biology to make such a tool. So this tool is a little precursor to that other tool that I hope to one day develop.

What it does:

Currently it doesnt do much of anything. But it's intended design would utilize objects, state patterns, graphs with labled edges and vertices (to label the elements and bond types of the compound), a specialized run-length decoder to interpret user inputted chemical formulas, and a small GUI application where users type in a chemical formula, and the program generates the line structre of any valid compound that they enter.

How we built it:

This project used a number of the concepts of previous CSE projects from 116 and 220 to take user input and represent that input in a detailed graph structure that can then be passed to a GUI application that uses a BFS algorthim to traverse the graph, drawing the chemical structure in the GUI as it does.

Challenges we ran into:

There were plenty of challenges that I ran into. How do I build a GUI application? How do I teach a computer chemistry? How do I configure the right libraries to me IDEA project so I can use JavaFX (still didn't figure that one out). But I figured so long as I kept moving forward, I'd keep making progress.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

I'm proud that I tried. I'm proud that I got stuck, made breakthroughs, and got stuck again. I'm proud that I kept moving forward... until I needed to fall asleep.