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Avogadro Libraries API Documentation

# Introduction

The Avogadro libraries are developed to support the Avogadro2 application, and provide liberally BSD-licensed, open-source reusable components. At its core it is a platform for developing molecular visualization, editing and interactive simulation applications. This is achieved using a collection of libraries, along with a plugin interface allowing the platform to be easily extended and used in a variety of environments.

## Main Classes

The Avogadro libraries are implemented as a set of libraries, where all classes are implemented in the Avogadro namespace, and each library uses a namespace to distinguish members of that library. Include directories are also divided up by library, resulting in classes such as Avogadro::Core::Molecule in the include file <avogadro/core/molecule.h>. Some of the main classes that are useful to get acquainted with are:

- Core::Molecule : The base molecule class, for representing molecules.
  - Core::Atom : Class representing atoms in a molecule.
  - Core::Bond : Class representing bonds in a molecule.
- Io::FileFormatManager : Convenience functions for file format wrangling.
- Io::FileFormat : Base class for all file format readers and writers.
  - Io::CjsonFormat : Chemical JSON format reader and writeer.
  - Io::CmlFormat : Chemical Markup Language reader/writer.
- Rendering::Scene : Class managing the main scene graph used for rendering.
- Rendering::Drawable : Base class for drawable items in the scene.
  - Rendering::SphereGeometry : Drawable item for spheres.
  - Rendering::CylinderGeometry : Drawable item for cylinders.
- QtGui::PeriodicTableView : A periodic table widget.
- QtOpenGL::GLWidget : Provides an OpenGL based widget for molecule rendering.

If you wish to extend Avogadro the main plugin base classes are:

- QtGui::ScenePlugin : Generate geometry to be rendered in the scene.
- QtGui::ToolPlugin : Base class for mouse interaction, editing, etc.
- QtGui::ExtensionPlugin : Base class for dialog/menu extensions.

# Resources

This project is developed as part of the Open Chemistry project. Please see the development guide if you would like to contribute to the project. Some key resources include:

- Wiki : http://wiki.openchemistry.org/
- Bug tracker : http://projects.openchemistry.org/
- Dashboard : http://cdash.openchemistry.org/index.php?project=AvogadroLibs
- Mailing lists: http://www.openchemistry.org/OpenChemistry/help/mailing.html