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→Creating a Twitter Widget using Processing.js
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 />Next came the demo I had been waiting to see. Al had created a widget for a web page that could grab twitter info and then aggregate it into the widget. The purpose of this demo was to show that with about 100 lines of code this technology could create a really professional looking animated feature for a personal website that could run on any modern browser using the canvas element for HTML5.
Al has a very supportive view on open source and allowing processing.js to leverage the full power of the web through a hopeful explosion of this technology in the near future. He mentioned some of the work the community has been doing and how to get involved in the community through the Google group or IRC. Al talked briefly about some of the contributions Seneca students have made already towards the project and how it is growing fast and being implemented at an increasing pace now.<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 '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.<br />
