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Having just recently switched my major project to work on processing.js I decided this was one presentation I could not miss out on. This talk was given by Al MacDonald who is a freelance web consultant. His website is [http://hyper-metrix.com/ Hyper-Metrix.com]. Al began his talk with an introduction into what processing.js is. He explained that processing is a language for creating 2D and 3D graphics, animations, and interactive applications.<br /> Processing is a language that was built to be run and parsed on a native JAVA client. So processing 'sketches' would be created and then run on the JAVA client which would process them and create the graphics, animations, text, etc in a window. Then a man by the name of John Resig came into the picture and started work on creating a port of processing for JAVA to processing for JavaScript. The idea was to be able to allow those sketches of animations, graphics, and interactive apps to be able to be drawn in a web browser without any plugins or extensions to install. Simply put a way to animate and 'interactify' the web and allow processing creations to 'just work' in modern browsers for users.<br /> After a brief intro into what PJS was and how it got started Al got into some code samples and showed some real time examples of making some simple demos. He showed how easy it is to get started and do some really neat things and basic animations with just a few lines of code. Following some code samples and demos he showed how some of the different parts of processing.js work and some examples of contributions that some of the students in our course have made.<br /> Al moved on to talk about the community and how it is contributing to the project and helping to implement some of the remaining code that still needs to be ported. A group of about nine Seneca students are working together to help port and test some of the remaining functions.<br />

After showing the Twitter widget demo Al proceeded to show a couple of interesting demos of how processing.js is being used on the web. One of the most interesting ones was a visual search engine called [http://askken.heroku.com/ Ask Ken]. It allows you to search for a topic and then presents you with a circular disc of results which you can then pick one and it will create an offshoot disc with a sub search of that choice and so on. It shows how even our most basic tasks like searching for information on the internet can be redefined as to how we do it using processing.<br /> A significant part of Al's presentation was a section titled 'Community and Mission' in which he talked about how the community is outward facing and open to anyone who wants to make contributions. He showed examples of how people can make contributions even if its not through writing code for the port itself. One of these examples was a website called [http://www.hascanvas.com/ HasCanvas] where you can go and paste a block of procesing processing code into a window and it will run the code for you in the browser and show you the output result much like the web based IDE only with a little more functionality and the ability to share a link to your creation with others. He also talked about the feature list and bug list the processing team has going on the mozilla Mozilla wiki that shows who is working on what areas and what bugs are currently known. Al rounded out his conversations on community by showing some of the contributions that Seneca students have made to date.<br /> For anyone interested in getting started with processing, there is a simple web IDE on the processing.js website that allows you to just enter in some sample processing code and see how it works without the need to download the source and install it locally or on a web host and no need to configure the canvas etc etc. Al gave a brief demonstration of the processing web IDE during the presentation and showed a simple example and modified it a few times and re-ran it to show how easy it was to get started.<br />