Introduction
Mandelbrot Madness JAVA! is a powerful GUI-based program designed for generating
Mandelbrot and Julia set images, browsing these fractals by "zooming" deep into their
structures, and saving images and image parameters to files, all through the power and
platform independence of Java. Originally based on a similar 32-bit Windows program of
the same name (minus the "JAVA"), MMJ! allows anyone, regardless of what type
of computer you have, to use the same program to quickly and easily generate pictures
of the most famous fractal in existence. Using its simple "point and click" interface,
aspiring new Mandelbrot explorers can zoom deep within these fascinating graphs and
save snapshot images or image parameters to files, which can be loaded and reused
later.
Fractals are one of the most intriguing concepts in mathematics, and the Mandelbrot Set is perhaps the most readily identified example. (Which is interesting, because the set really isn't a fractal, but the plot of it is.) Discovered by the brilliant Polish mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and published in his book Les objets fractals, forn, hasard et dimension in 1975, it is perhaps one of the most often displayed images in all of mathematics and computer science. The fascinating notion of a mathematical function so simple creating an infinitely intricate and visually breathtaking image is one that has intrigued scientists and mathematicians for years.
And now, thanks to Mandelbrot Madness JAVA!, you can explore this incredible, magical mystery from your own desktop, quickly and conveniently.
Below is a quick list of some of MMJ!'s many features:
[Top]
History
Part One: Slavery to Bill Gates...
Mandelbrot Madness! started as a combination of curiosity about Mandelbrot images and fractals, and a desire to learn Visual C++.
During my senior year of college, I took a class in computer graphics. Instead of concentrating on software packages and how to use them, like the course one of my friends took at another school, our class concentrated on the fundamentals of graphics. Instead of using the cosine shading tool, we wrote our own cosine shading programs. Instead of loading up the latest, greatest ray tracing tool, we wrote our own. We also experimented with fractals, which always strikes a computer scientist's interest. And wherever there are fractals, there's the Mandelbrot set.
Being the ambitious little geek I was, I quickly took the Pascal code handed out in class, ported it to C, and had a handy little Mandelbrot renderer for DOS. It produced 16-color 480 x 480 gray-scale images. I even modified it somewhat to create a virtual slide show during one of our engineering open houses at school. The problem came when I wanted to capture the images to a file.
I never was familiar enough with the internal structure of the various popular image formats to trust myself to modify my DOS program to write to a file. For quite a while, the only method available to me was to run the program in a DOS window under Windows 95, then use an image editor such as Paint Shop Pro to do a screen capture. The image could then be cropped down and saved under whatever image format I could want. However, this imposed a number of limitations that I did not care for. Win95 cannot support running SVGA in a DOS window, so I was limited to the 16 colors my compiler's graphics routines could support. For the same reason, I could only make images as large as 480 x 480 pixels. To complicate matters, juggling the different windows and screen captures was not fun, and seemed a bit too many hoops to jump through to obtain a simple image. What I needed was something that (1) could produce an image whatever size and color depth I wanted, (2) save it to a standard image format recognized by most image editors, and (3) would be a bit easier to use and more portable.
That's when I turned to Visual C++.
I took a Visual C++ class in school the same semester, but graphics projects and my senior project distracted me and I did poorly in the class. My gracious instructor was understanding, though, and was quite kind to me and gave me a decent grade. But I truly wanted to learn Visual C++, so I purchased it from the school and tasked myself to learn it on my own. My efforts wavered somewhat, until I finally obtained some computer-based training at work. Also, through the miracle of the Internet, I also happened upon some rather gracious young programmers in Denmark, who freely distributed their VC++ code to handle standard Windows DIB bitmaps. Thus, Mandelbrot Madness! was born.
Part Two: Liberation through Java...
I was quite satisfied (and full of myself) with the Win32 version of MM! It was quite a thrill knowing that I had put that Visual C++ knowledge to work, and I spent many an hour happily zooming deeper and deeper into the Mandelbrot set. However, there was just one problem: How do I share this new-found joy with everyone in the Internet? I had already decided I would build a small Web page devoted to MM! and allow visitors to download it freely. But how could I share MM! with visitors and entice them to download it? And what about all those out there who were not shackled into using an operating system built by Bill Gates? How could they share my fun when they aren't confined to DLLs and BMPs?
I had considered building a Java Mandelbrot viewer for some time, and the poor quality of many of those I had seen seemed to prompt me further down this path. So I decided to put my new knowledge to work and, armed with my notes from the Java class I took my senior year and the JDK documentation, I quickly set out to create what would ultimately become Mandelbrot Madness JAVA! 1.0.
MMJ! 1.1 (still available at our web site) would be a Java applet, confined to a Web page, and would allow visitors to the site to use a limited set of the tools available in the Win32 version. And it works quite well. However, never satisfied, I wanted more. While MMJ! 1.1 was great as a demonstration applet, it could never be much more than that. I really wanted to create a fully featured version that could do everything the Win32 version could do. Plus, there were a number of features I wanted to include in the Windows version of MM! that I had no clue of how to do in Visual C++, but implementing in Java would be relatively a cinch.
So back to the compilers we go....
MMJ! 2.0 was a relatively quick creation, taking only a couple months of off-again, on-again coding and design. A quick jaunt to the Web brought me to the discovery of GIFEncoder, a freely available series of Java classes written by Adam Doppelt for generating GIF images. And, after pouring over much code and drawing endless diagrams, I finally discovered a long standing bug that was plaguing the old Windows version and was working its way into this version. (Fixing this bug finally promoted the Windows version to 1.0.) And with the introduction of 3.0, even more features worked their way in, making the Windows version increasingly obsolete. (Hmm... Windows obsolete... I like the sound of that....) All in all, it was a fun, exciting, and fulfilling project for me, and I hope that you will find it just as fun and exciting to use.
[Top]
Version History
Below is the version history for Mandelbrot Madness JAVA!:
[Top]
© Copyright 1999, Jeffrey T. Darlington. All rights reserved.