Processing Visualization Language Ported To Javascript

Manfre writes "On his birthday, John Resig (creator of jQuery) has given a present to developers by releasing Processing.js. This is a Javascript port of the Processing Visualization Language and a first step towards Javascript being a rival to Flash for online graphics content. His blog post contains an excellent writeup with many demos."

Re:'polished turd'

[AKAImBatman]

Check out http://varriastudios.com/ [varriastudios.com] for a site that illustrates what I'm talking about.

A user interface? I think you have a very odd definition of "Fast". All you've proven is that Flash is designed to do pretty animations. Well, that's kind of the point. Not to run "Fast". "Fast" was never a part of the design. Just look up the "Actions" portion of the Flash 8 spec sometime and you'll be utterly horrified.

That being said, Flash does do animations well. That's what it was designed for. As a result, it has even been used to create games [newgrounds.com]. It never did games all that well, but Moore's law eventually made it possible to come up with some fairly decent stuff.

Of course, if you're referring to "my Flash animations move faster than my DHTML animation", that's just plain user-error. The Flash animations work better because Flash Studio works out all the timings of the motions for you. If you Actionscripted your motions, they'd come out about the same as they would in Javascript. (And being nearly the same language, it's possible to try the same motion code in both.)

This issue is what the Javascript PVL is intended to solve. i.e. A standard framework for providing animation/motion with minimal input from the developer.

Re:'polished turd'

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash doesn't exist anymore to do animation or dynamic graphics, it exists to run fast.

Clearly you've never run Flash on Mac OS.

Re:'polished turd'

[kestasjk]

JS engines aren't currently designed for it, but this is what Canvas (and a lot of HTML5) is all about..

If you prefer think of this as Processing on Canvas, rather than Processing on JavaScript, because Canvas is the enabling technology here.

And I don't know where you get off calling it a "polished turd". (Makes me want to poke around your homepage-vertisement, and see if you have a right to make those judgements)

The Java requirement was always a pain to deal with before, and this "polished turd" removes that and makes visualizations much more portable and easier to play around with.

Also the moving visualizations have always been CPU intensive, that's the nature of what they are; they're supposed to be easy to create visualizations of data, it's not a video game. It was like this on Java too.
Note that the static practical visualizations, which take dynamic data, draw the visualization and then end, need much less CPU than dynamic ones like you might see in a flashy demo.

This is a very good thing, and a very welcome surprise; Processing really does offer something that's pretty unique, and I look forward to seeing more of it. Kudos Resig

Re:Heh AvP comes ot mind here

[Uncle Focker]

You lose anyway.

It comes with the territory.

You and the rest of the "ASCII text forever" crowd don't speak for me.

And this crowd, whose membership I've been forced into against my will, doesn't speak for me either.

Re:My Post

[compro01]

COBOL is still alive and kicking in the financial sector and it's fairly decent for what it's designed to do. i really wouldn't want to use it for general programming, but i wouldn't want to write a payroll app in C++ either.

Re:My Post

[SanityInAnarchy]

That's funny.

Maybe you should actually look up the very history of Javascript -- the programmer wanted an embedded LISP. Some PHB-type wanted it to look like C, so it would be more approachable. So he took his embedded LISP and gave it a C-like syntax.

Or maybe you should've Googled about Lisp and Javascript. Here, go read. [crockford.com]

Re:'polished turd'

[AKAImBatman]

With the increasing number of Flex developers and Flash developers switching over to AS3 and the Flash 9 AVM2 engine

Who still haven't produced a critical mass of software yet. In fact, there are very few Flex sites in existence. Adobe's exit from the J2EE market hasn't helped their case one bit.

Check out all those flash sites that use papervision3d, a 3D software renderer for Flash. That's all Flash 9 AS3.

Papervision 3D was created for Flash 8 [googlecode.com] and ported to Flash 9 [googlecode.com]. If you see a Papervision app, there's a good chance it's Flash 8.

[Flex is] growing as an alternative to AJAX because AJAX eats a crapload of bandwidth since the Javascript code and XML aren't compressed.

AJAX uses as much or as little bandwidth as you design it to. (That's one of the reasons why JSON is becoming a popular alternative to XML.) Flex will happily chew just as much bandwidth if you design it to do so. In fact, if you use the object remoting features, you're likely to use a lot MORE bandwidth due to the nature of distributed objects.

Oh, and my company compresses the hell out of our Javascript and XML. Seems this little thing called GZip compression [websiteoptimization.com] is supported by every major browser on the market. Who'da'thunk, eh?

Moreover, your front-end code is visible in AJAX.

You don't really know a whole lot about AS3, do you? Like, for example, it's stupidly easy to decompile the code [flashsec.org]. Worrying about someone having access to your source is so 1990's. You had better get over it, because your source is open for the world to see. That goes for Java, Javascript, Actionscript, C#, and just about any other modern language you can think of.

you sir, are talking out of your ass.

Classic case of pot and kettle. Please get your facts straight before being so rude in the future. It really is upsetting and therefore tempting to use rather abusive language in return.