webFractal: Web-based Fractal Explorer

Paul Butler – February 17, 2007

Last weekend, I won a nice new Toshiba laptop in a local software competition. My entry was a web-based fractal explorer. I had a lot of fun making it, and it is fun to play with as well. I have decided to release it under an open-source license so that other people can play around with it (see the download link at the bottom of this post).

Unfortunately, I do not have access to a powerful Tomcat server with a lot of bandwidth, so I can’t host an online demo.

Here are some screenshots of the application in action:

webFractal Screenshot 1 webFractal Screenshot 2 webFractal Screenshot 3

webFractal Screenshot 4 webFractal Screenshot 5 webFractal Screenshot 6

Since it is a web-based application, any supported web browser can be the client (see the documentation for a list of supported browsers; any modern Gecko-based browser is supported as well as IE and Opera.) The client interface is loosely based on Google Maps. The server is a Java Servlet run through Tomcat. You can read more about how it works in the documentation.

The source code is hosted on GitHub


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