Processing

24 Nov 2014 - sjl

I’ve always liked Processing. Weather it’s an idea for an interesting visual effect or perhaps a game mechanic, I want to make it happen as fast as I can. And in terms of quickly prototyping something, and getting to a result fast, Processing is pretty much unbeatable for me.

I don’t love the name though. It’s obviously a pain googling for say, “Processing JSON bug” or whatever. If only they had fully adopted the “p5″ name instead, but I digress.

Now I haven’t actually used Processing in years but I’ve recently returned to it. I was prototyping a game idea using phaser.io and hit what seemed to be a few blockers. I switched to processing and had a decent prototype running nicely within a couple of hours. It also involved less head scratching, although admittedly that may well have more to do with my familiarity with Processing versus my limited experience with phaser.io.

The down side is, well.. Java. That wasn’t so much of a problem in 2003 or so – how else would I share with others via the web? But the world has thankfully moved on, and I can’t even bring myself to export my sketches as applets. But I obviously want to share my work online. Fortunately there looks to be a couple of good options, namely processing.js and p5.js. The latter looks particularly promising – it’s inspired by processing but reinterprets it for today’s web.

I’ve never actually used Processing to create an Android app, and I’m not even sure how complete or mature that pathway is. However if I can develop using p5.js targeting browsers and also export standalone Android apps (via cocoon.js for example), then I may just have a new (old) favorite toy.