Processing Visualization Language Ported To Javascript

Manfre writes "On his birthday, John Resig (creator of jQuery) has given a present to developers by releasing Processing.js. This is a Javascript port of the Processing Visualization Language and a first step towards Javascript being a rival to Flash for online graphics content. His blog post contains an excellent writeup with many demos."

Comments

Re:'polished turd'

[AKAImBatman]

Check out http://varriastudios.com/ for a site that illustrates what I'm talking about.

A user interface? I think you have a very odd definition of "Fast". All you've proven is that Flash is designed to do pretty animations. Well, that's kind of the point. Not to run "Fast". "Fast" was never a part of the design. Just look up the "Actions" portion of the Flash 8 spec sometime and you'll be utterly horrified.

That being said, Flash does do animations well. That's what it was designed for. As a result, it has even been used to create games. It never did games all that well, but Moore's law eventually made it possible to come up with some fairly decent stuff.

Of course, if you're referring to "my Flash animations move faster than my DHTML animation", that's just plain user-error. The Flash animations work better because Flash Studio works out all the timings of the motions for you. If you Actionscripted your motions, they'd come out about the same as they would in Javascript. (And being nearly the same language, it's possible to try the same motion code in both.)

This issue is what the Javascript PVL is intended to solve. i.e. A standard framework for providing animation/motion with minimal input from the developer.

Re:'polished turd'

[kestasjk]

JS engines aren't currently designed for it, but this is what Canvas (and a lot of HTML5) is all about..

If you prefer think of this as Processing on Canvas, rather than Processing on JavaScript, because Canvas is the enabling technology here.

And I don't know where you get off calling it a "polished turd". (Makes me want to poke around your homepage-vertisement, and see if you have a right to make those judgements)

The Java requirement was always a pain to deal with before, and this "polished turd" removes that and makes visualizations much more portable and easier to play around with.

Also the moving visualizations have always been CPU intensive, that's the nature of what they are; they're supposed to be easy to create visualizations of data, it's not a video game. It was like this on Java too.
Note that the static practical visualizations, which take dynamic data, draw the visualization and then end, need much less CPU than dynamic ones like you might see in a flashy demo.

This is a very good thing, and a very welcome surprise; Processing really does offer something that's pretty unique, and I look forward to seeing more of it. Kudos Resig

Re:My Post

[compro01]

COBOL is still alive and kicking in the financial sector and it's fairly decent for what it's designed to do. i really wouldn't want to use it for general programming, but i wouldn't want to write a payroll app in C++ either.