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Changes
→DOM Integration?? (need a better header)
The original Processing Language is Java based. To run a Processing sketch in a web page, the Java code has to be completely converted into JavaScript. While syntactically JavaScript and Java are fairly similar, there are some fundamental differences that has made this conversion challenging. The first is that we wanted to do this conversion dynamically in real time. The code produced by the converter needed to be fully object oriented and we had to provide support to all native Java functions and objects (such as Strings) that are supported by Processing. We also had to take into account the differences between working with web resources vs local resources. Furthermore we had to consider how we would handle some fundamental differences between Java and JavaScript such as typed vs. typeless variables, function overloading and variable name overloading.
From it's inception, Processing.js was designed to be more than just a rewrite of the Java functions provided by Processing to JavaScript. John Resig wrote the original Processing.js parser to scan the code in a Processing sketch for hints of Java code and convert that code to JavaScript. However, if the parser encountered JavaScript code, it would leave the code intact. This method allowed not only for the conversion of existing Processing code to JavaScript but the injection of JavaScript into Processing sketches as well. By not onlyThis simple idea means that within a processing sketch Java and JavaScript code can exist together without any need to declare the language you are using.
