As Egon has pointed out, the CDK project started 10 years ago today tomorrow – congratulations to everybody involved in the project. But also, Egon deserves a huge vote of thanks for keeping the project going – not only in terms of code contributions but also the “grunt” work such as releases, bug fixes, documentation and so on. Which might be boring, but are vital to making the library usable.

I started hacking on the CDK around 2004 (as a way to learn Java!) and while it still does have rough edges, it’s become quite capable. As Egon points out, we’ve come a long way, but it’s still a completely volunteer project. And so things like bug fixes and feature requests take time to get resolved (and some are still languishing for months or years). Certainly, external funding would be great, (I still think that the NIH was short sighted in not funding our software development grant), but in absence of that we’ll still forge ahead in our free time. I liked Egons list of things to happen in 2011 and I’d love to see the implementation of some force fields – UFF is a start, MMFF94 would be really useful – as that’d begin to address one of my wishlist items, viz., GRID decsriptors.

But anyway, today tomorrow we  pop some champagne (virtually)