[LAU] Processing ?

[Justin Smith]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 5:17 AM, Dave Phillips <dlphillips at woh.rr.com> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> As I explore AVSynthesis I've been looking for similar applications and
> environments. I'm already familiar with the Pd/GEM powerhouse combo, but
> I keep searching for others.
>
> Has anyone here worked with this software :
>
> http://processing.org
>
> ?
>
> Might be interesting.
>
> Best,
>
> dp
>
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A friend and I used processing to make an interactive algorithmic
polyrythmic OSC sequencer:
http://deathbyhonor.com/projects/nodeSeq/nodeSeq.html I wouldn't quite
consider it "done" and it is not totally stable yet, but it at least
gives a bit of an example of what processing can do (I don't think we
documented the experimental user interface yet at all... good luck! if
I recall correctly most things are done by dragging objects or right
clicking them?). Mind you the source code for this project is far from
a template for good processing code... I implemented linked lists and
a bunch of the lisp linked list operations from scratch before
realizing I could have used some built in java classes for that
functionality.

Processing is interesting. I found it to be frustratingly slow,
between the sluggishness of java on linux (or did I just pick the
wrong java?) and the age of my computer. It is a thin veneer over the
java language, mainly adding an implicit run loop, interactive image
synthesis oriented libraries, and some reduction in verbosity. I also
found the IDE frustrating (it is no Emacs). The processing project has
a marketing department, and they try to be "cool". Despite all this,
it is capable of some great stuff without too much effort. If you
don't need your final result to be interactive, you may also want to
check out context-free, which is a more specialized image synthesis
language based on logo and context free grammars. Another possibility
to consider is http://www.pawfal.org/Software/fluxus/ which is a
visual live-coding environment, and it is a pity that it uses mzscheme
while snd's lisp backend uses guile, because otherwise it would be
unbeatable for multimedia livecoding (if your cpu could keep up, of
course). fluxus has fewer backends than processing (processing can do
opengl in real time, svg or png output, quicktime movies, plus others,
while fluxus only does opengl), and a smaller set of libraries, but
livecoding has an appeal to it, and scheme is definitely a more
flexible language than java. If all you need is opengl and OSC then
fluxus could be worth considering.