2.1. What is Processing?

Processing was conceived as a language for artists. It was developed as an open source project (initiated by Casey Reas and Benjamin Fry while at MIT) specifically intended to teach programming skills via the instant feedback of visuals. It’s built on a much more complex and powerful language, Java, but greatly simplified and applied. As it has grown in popularity, the simplicity of the core language has been enhanced with third-party libraries, enabling it to also be put to other more sophisticated uses: drawing in 3D, reading XML, talking to MIDI or Arduino, or interfacing with other APIs (Flickr, Twitter, and so on).

Mozilla, the organization behind the open source Firefox web browser, has announced Processing for the Web, a project proposal for porting the Processing language and environment to the open web, so it can integrate with standard technologies like JavaScript and HTML5’s Canvas tag. This would mean Processing could be run directly in the web browser, without a plug-in. Already, strides have been made in this direction with John Resig’s Processing.js project, which implements Processing in JavaScript. There are also implementations of Processing in Ruby (http://wiki.github.com/jashkenas/ruby-processing/), Clojure (http://github.com/rosado/clj-processing), and Scala (http://technically.us/spde/), all of which have emerged as grassroots projects, typically through the work of a single coder, in the last two years. They’re clear symptoms of the growing popularity of Processing and its potential for the future. The barriers for entry are dropping as the potential distribution opportunities are expanding.