Everything began with a Computer Recreations article by A. Dewdney in the June '88 issue of Scientific American. Yes, it took me 9 years to make something usable with the ideas described there! It described how to manually re-create arabesques and that something might be possible using computers.
A few years later, I discovered Ray-tracing on my Amiga 500 (I was patient then ;-), using a freeware program called "DBW Render". As it featured marble textures, The idea of drawing arabesques came back... but I didn't find how to go from manual ideas to algorithms.
Since then, I had always kept this idea in mind, until I found a nice site explaining with simple words some principles about geometric cristallography. I then introduced the idea of primary and secondary circles, set up my first Perl prototypes, and a few days later, I produced my first computer-assisted arabesque. Then as the proto seemed able to bring nice results, I decided to add a gui and to devellop the whole system with Java. In february 1998, the first public version was on-line. It evolved a bit until version 0.9d (march 98). Then, having no message from any user, I stopped the development. In september, I restarted it after interesting contacts with a motivated user, and on november 27th, 1998, I made my first "weaving" arabesque, 10 years and 5 months after reading the inspiring article.
When the first "stable" version 1.0 was released in april 2000, it was already clear that it was not finished. The many drawbacks due to the old Java AWT GUI did not allow to make a nice interface. The code was a mess, and as the user feedback was very low, it was a way to close the project for a while.
However, the ideas continued to come, so that when some users asked in may 2001 for new features, contributing feedback and ideas, a lot of things were waiting for an implementation.
Currently the project is alive, the "to do" list is long and growing, and seven people have been contributing directly to it by different means. We have no definite timeframe, we just release a new version about once a month. In the meantime, the documentation grew a lot and is much more comprehensive than it used to be. The 2.0 version finally went out in january, 2004. A new page in this site will soon list the projects planned for the next version.
Because it draws arabesques. The German spelling is an obvious tribute to Robert Schumann.
This tool was originally designed as a small Perl script for testing, but Java enables the use of a GUI I wish easy to use (tell me!). As a former Amiga user, I felt very concerned with compatibility problems, so I like the idea of a platform-independant tool, freely usable. Arabeske currently uses Java 1.3. This might change in the future. Java 1.5 is about to be released, and it will bring a lot of useful features.
The developpement was made under win 95 using Dick Chase's Java Editor 2.08a, then under Linux with the JDE XEmacs package. When the development restarted for 1.1.x after a year-long break, I switched to JBuilder 4, then to Eclipse by end 2002, though still using some more traditionnal tools like makefiles and some scripts for packaging.