Ajaxular - All Things AJAX

A while back I wrote a post about Processing (you can read my previous post here). If you haven't seen Processing before, it is a Java based development platform that rivals Flash. Well, John Resig has written a cool port of the Processing API to JavaScript.

Below is an excerpt from John's post.

The Processing Language

The first portion of the project was writing a parser to dynamically convert code written in the Processing language, to JavaScript. This involves a lot of gnarly regular expressions chewing up the code, spitting it out in a format that the browser understands.

It works "fairly well" (in that it's able to handle anything that the processing.org web site throws at it) but I'm sure its total scope is limited (until a proper parser is involved). I felt bad about tackling this using regular expressions until I found out that the original Processing code base did it in the same manner (they now use a real parser, naturally).

The language includes a number of interesting aspects, many of which are covered in the basic demos. Here's a brief selection of language features that are handled:

• Types and type casting - Type information is generally discarded, but becomes important in variable declaration and in casting (which is generally handled well).
• Classes - The full class system is supported (can be instantiated, etc. just fine).
• Method overloading and multiple constructors - Within classes you can have multiple method (or constructor) definitions - with the appropriate methods being called, based upon their signature length.
• Inheritance - Even classical-style inheritance is supported.

Note: There's one feature of Processing that's pretty much impossible to support: variable name overloading. In Processing you can have variables and functions that have the same name (e.g. float size = 0; float size(){}). In order to support this there would have to be considerable overhead - and it's generally not a good practice to begin with.

You can read the full post here.

If you get some time over the weekend, you might want to play with the new Processing JavaScript API. This looks like another good job by John Resig.

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