Colour Chart

This essay does not describe an existing computer program, just one that should exist. This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project.

This project outline is not like the artificial tidy problems you are spoon-fed in school, when all the facts you need are included, nothing extraneous is mentioned, the answer is fully specified, along with hints to nudge you toward a single expected canonical solution. This project is much more like the real world of messy problems where it is up to you to fully the define the end point, or a series of ever more difficult versions of this project, and research the information yourself to solve them.

Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; or give you any additional materials. I have too many other projects of my own.

Though I am a programmer, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project in any way you please and to keep all the profits from your endeavor.

Have a look at the Netscape Colour Chart. Create something similar done as a Java Applet so that you could test your browser to see how it distorts Java colours. There is no problem with all the Netscape/X11 colour names being supported — you can easily add them all as static final Color constants or as ints, so you could dispense with the "using name" columns of the table. Allow the following sorts: alphabetical by colour name, HSB, HBS, SHB, SBH, BHS, BSH, RGB, RBG, GRB, GBR, BRG, BGR. The Applet is a pretty toy that may also help sharpen intuition about how the various colour representations work. See RGB and HSB in the Java & Internet Glossary. The sorting could be done most rapidly with RadixSort available with source via the Java & Internet Glossary.

For an added bonus, add columns that display the hue as the spectral frequency and wavelength.

Then do a colour chooser bean. You can choose the colour by keying: red/green/blue, hue/saturation/brightness, hex number, decimal number or selecting Netscape X11 colour name. As you change each value (or use the spinner controls), all the other ways of expressing the colour change to stay in step.

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