I thank Konrad Polthier from Zuse Institute in Berlin for his support of my work. He was the one who introduced me into JavaView secrets. All presented here JavaView applets were designed especially for the needs of this web site. I thank also Klaus Drescher for creating xvc2jvx utility exporting MuPAD graphics to JVX and JVD formats.
Mirek Majewski
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About JavaView on This Web Site
In recent years a few technologies for displaying mathematical graphics on the web were invented. JavaView is one of the most wonderful developments in this area. It came in in late nineties as an outcome of a research project by Dr Konrad Polthier and his research team from Technische Universität in Berlin and later from Zuse Institute Berlin. First public release of JavaView was in November 1999. However, at this time JavaView tools were already used for about one year in research and teaching at TU. Major goal of JavaView is to display mathematical objects on the web and allow interactive experimentation. JavaView can be used as a standalone application or in the form of applets through a web page.
JavaView can import files produced with Maple and Mathematica. However, its native format is JVX—an XML language for visualization of 2D and 3D objects. MuPAD 3.0 exports its graphics directly to a JVX file. At the time of writing this text JVX is a bit limited and a few features of 3D graphics cannot be rendered using JavaView tools. Therefore, while exporting MuPAD graphics to JVX we have to realize that not everything from MuPAD file can be preserved. A serious limitation is the complexity of 3D graphics and consequently the size of the rendering engine. Therefore, quite often we have to sacrifice some more sophisticated features of 3D graphics and use simplified models.
Since version 3.1 MuPAD will export both JVX file with description of a 3D scene and JVD file describing camera properties. We can display our graphics using multiple cameras and choosing different display options. Depending on which JavaView applet we will use we can apply custom transparency to our graphs, display lines, patches, normal vectors to the surface as well as many other components of our graphics.
Free JavaView classes with complete documentation are available from JavaView project web pages at www.javaview.de. Therefore, this is possible to develop custom applications with expanded functionality like the one in the enclosed picture. However, for most of mathematics visualizations it would be completely enough to use one of a few free Java applets that are available for JavaView web site.
Here is an example of graphics file produced in MuPAD, saved as JVX+JVD and displayed with light version of JavaView applet. More examples like this are enclosed in the examples section of this web site.
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