Prototyping
The work on Group Explorer began in June 2003. Those beginnings were
a prototyping of the algorithms for
auto-generating Cayley diagrams. The tools I used for such
prototyping were Petite Chez Scheme and POV-Ray,
because I didn't know OpenGL at the time.
Scheme is an excellent language for getting a complex program running quickly,
because you don't have to worry about declaring data structures, and the
language's flexibility and robustness make projects require little overhead.
I wrote Scheme programs that made POV-Ray source code, and POV-Ray turned them
into 3D scenes. This original test had good results (and in fact gave
the development team many helpful
insights).
Programming
The first version of Group Explorer that was posted to the web (see
the History page, if you dare) was written
using Borland Delphi Studio
7, a product for which I have high regard. Originally I wrote the 3D
imaging routines myself in Delphi, because I did not know
OpenGL, but then I took
a class on
computer graphics, and now the images look much better (thanks,
Andrew Hanson). The next
version will not be written in Delphi, because I plan to make it truly
cross-platform (see Vision and Goals).
Therefore the next version (beginning fall 2004) will use
Qt 3.
Documenting
This web site, various presentations on Group Explorer, and miscellaneous
other documentation were all done using
Microsoft Office.
