Changes

==DOM Integration?? (need a better header)JavaScript== When the original Processing Language, also known as P5, was first developed Java was suppose to become the language of the web while JavaScript was a little toy language that many did not take serious. However, as the web matured, JavaScript became the language of the web but many of the misconceptions about it still persists. /*cite javascript the good parts here*/ With recent developments in JavaScript technology, JavaScript is now fast enough to handle the demands of realtime interactive web graphics.

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.