The Processing library that initially targeted at graphics designers, has recently been released in a stable version, and I’ve just found the time to have a quick look at it.

Processing on Ubuntu Intrepid 64

A few features impressed me right “out of the box”:

• the IDE is well designed I think:
  • straightforward: only the necessary elements are displayed: run/stop buttons and the usual saving ones
  • elegant with nice shapes and colors (even the syntactic highlighting matches the colors from the rest of the GUI)
  • the documentation is easily accessible by right-clicking on a keyword¹
• the packaging has been made carefully, though it’s probably been made easier with the use of Java and an open source license, some stuff is really meaningful to me:
  • it installed without a glitch on my Ubuntu64
  • the IDE offers an export function that make it possible to turn a simple script in a standalone application (to do some demos, and/or to put it on the web)
  • there are a lot of sample scripts available that are really helpful to find out about the library’s various features and the way to use them.

I haven’t looked at the scriting language in detail, yet, but from what I saw in the sample scripts and also from the good reputation of the library on the net, I guess I should not be deceived.

1. I’d certainly like to put this in my MathBench project [↩]