The twist is that the computations are handled server-side, using DWScript JIT compiler, so exploration can be fairly fast and comfortable even on low-powered hardware, be it an iPad, a Smartphone or an old laptop.

It can be reached at the following address: http://mandel.delphitools.info:8080

• You can zoom with the mouse wheel, pinch gestures, double clicks/taps or the +/- buttons.
• URLs hold position and zoom information, so you can bookmark or pass links around.

The Mandelbrot is a quite varied fractal, you may be surprised by what you can find in different areas, it never really repeats itself. It’s only quasi-self-similar.

Thanks go to Simon Stuart from the Delphi Developers Group on Google Plus for hosting the main server (those subscribed to the G+ group got a small preview/experiment last week, this is an improved version).

Navigation is handled by OpenLayers, I’m using the Zoomify url format, but that’s just a call convention from when the code was initially made a few years ago. The server-side script generates jpeg tiles on demand when it doesn’t have them in cache, though there are billions of tiles, so odds are once you zoom in, you’re not hitting the cache.

Jpeg compression is handled through libjpeg-turbo, using the Delphi headers from OpenGL24.de. FWIW the Jpeg compression with libjpeg-turbo is 7 to 8 times faster than TJpegImage.