Ajaxular - All Things AJAX - Processing Overview

Processing Overview

John Resig has written a good overview of Processing. Processing is a data visualization language written in Java that has been compared favorably to Flash. I first saw the language a couple of years ago and was very interested in it, but haven't seen much on it until this.

Below is an excerpt from the post.

Processing is a data visualization programming language.

It has three components:

The Processing language

The Processing drawing API

The implementation (in Java - can optionally pass the drawing API through to OpenGL).

The Processing Language and API

Strictly typed

Has classes, inheritance

Includes a bunch of globally-accessible functions (the drawing API - very flat and PHP-like).

Basic Program Structure

Two core methods: setup() and draw()

Very OpenGL-like

draw() is called continually at a specific framerate (if none is specified then it goes as fast as possible)

Simple example: Drawing a continuous line with the mouse.

void setup() {
size(200, 200);
background(102);

}

void draw() {
stroke(255);
if(mousePressed) {

line(mouseX, mouseY, pmouseX, pmouseY);
}
}

You can read the full post here.

Processing is a very interesting language and I could see it being very useful for applications that need a better way to represent information than is available in browser rendering. If you have never seen Processing, then you should look at some of the examples in John's post.