The grit42 platform
We are far away from Denmark. How will it perform here?
Our hosting partner has server farms in relevant parts of the world like New York, Frankfurt and Singapore to mention a few. We deploy our platform to the location that is nearest you and thereby reduce the latency as much as possible.
Looks cool – and dark! What about printing and screen shots?
Yes, we agree. It does look cool! And it’s great to look at and work with on the screen.
But in meeting rooms with bad projectors it can be hard to read and the dark background is not good for printing. We therefore also have a “light” theme user can switch to if they prefer or when needed for meeting rooms and printing
We already have our own internal compound/structure database. Can we still use grit42?
Yes, certainly. We can either just link to the compound numbers in your database – but then you will not have structures and chemical awareness in our platform – or we can extract and import your structures into our platform.
We have a lot of historic data we would like to load into the platform as well. Is that doable?
Yes, that is doable. If you have structures in SD-files or in a database from where you can export SD-files you can bulk upload them from the front end via our SD-loader. If you have experimental results we will firstly need to create relevant setups and then the results can be added via drag/drop in the front end.
If it really is a lot of historic data stored in several different systems and formats we can talk about how we can help you.
Can we export the plots, curves etc for use in presentations?
Yes, the plots and curves can easily be exported as .png files so you can copy them into slides for your presentations
We do not need all the features your platform seems to offer. Can we get a smaller part of it?
Yes! You can get the platform on it’s own as a scientific data management system - the grit product - or add the more specific features you need for your workflows. The gritCurveFit product can also be acquired as a stand alone App for support of plate based curve fitting. If you have question about this and what would make sense for you then just ask.
Do you have an API?
Yep!
We have a REST API documented with Swagger. It's fairly sophisticated so you can perform complex queries against the database from other applications or development tools like R and Python.
Can we ETL some of the data to our corporate datawarehouse?
Yes!
You can use our API to extract the data from the platform and then pipe it to your other internal systems.
OR, if you prefer we can also help you setup ETL procedures on the database level.
What technologies are you using?
We generally utilise the well know open source tools that many companies and organisations know about and have been using for many years.
Here's the general stack from the top:
Javascript library: React
Web framework: RubyOnRails
Database: Postgresql
Chemical cartridge for structure storing and searching: RDKit
For the more advanced maths/stats and plotting:
We use Python behind the scenes for some of the maths as it holds many releavnt scientific libraries and many of our customers have internal data scientists using it.
We use Plotly for the plots in the UI.
We deploy using Docker containers
If we host the servers for you the technologies are not that relevant. All you need is a browser
If you prefer to host - locally or in your cloud - then you need a server with Docker installed. You - or your IT folks - do not need to know about the tools in our technology stack as it's all packaged in a so called Docker container
But does Rails scale?
You may naturally have a very highly efficient research organisation with high level of data production! But that said...what scale do you actually need?
You may not know this, but Rails is the backbone of companies like Shopify, Airbnb, Github etc (see more here). So the answer is "yes, Rails does scale" and we are rather confident that it will also scale well enough for your needs.
If you would like to know more about Ruby on Rails (rails) then have a look at this brand new documentary (November 2023) where the founders and initial maintainers talk about the history of Rails.