Kyle Klipowicz wrote:
Hi list~
I was wondering if anyone had used processing (http://processing.org/) for interface work or algorithm programming. It is made by some people at MIT and is based in Java. It has libraries which allow UDP and OSC communication, as well as much video stuff. I have just grown curious about it, so any comments from experienced users would be appreciated.
we have been using it for few tests, and it is nice to use. You can easily connect it to Pd via OSC and it seems to run ok in all platforms. You can save what you do as applets. And if need you can fairly easily use any other java library, as far as i know i havent done it myself. They have a mailing list that seems to be ok and there are many examples around to check and learn. I think it is a nice "safe" environment to work with, I find it myself too safe for my taste but i guess many people might love it. I heard that it is actually based on a quite old java specification, a java programmer told me that it is "8 years old technology packaged in a nice looking way", i think there is a but of this, but no doubt it will help many people "scaping" from other more restricted frameworks like for example Flash. Thats all i can say, probably other people will be able to say more in depth comments about it.
On the other hand we are also developing our own Python based OpenGL 2D engine which should actually run faster and it is nicer to program with. I heard that next version of processing will be OpenGL based, this would make it much more faster. HOwever i find programming in Python so much nicer than java that i doubt i would go for processing, but this is very personal thing :)
if you are interested on the python 2d engine we will release a second alpha version soon.
hope it helps
enrike