What is processing?

The Processing language was created by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. It evolved from ideas explored in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab and was originally intended to be used in a Java run-time environment. In the Summer of 2008, John Resig ( inventor of jQuery ), ported the 2D context of Processing to Javascript for use in web pages.

Mmm how about processing.js then?

Processing.js is an open programming language for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions for the web without using Flash or Java applets. Processing.js uses Javascript to draw shapes and manipulate images on the HTML5 Canvas element. The code is light-weight, simple to learn and makes an ideal tool for visualizing data, creating user-interfaces and developing web-based games.

Processing.js is explicitly developed for browsers that support the HTML5 <Canvas> element. Processing.js runs in FireFox, Safari, Opera and Chrome but will not be supported in Internet Explorer.

There’s more: some people in London created iProcessing, which lets you develop iPhone apps without touching objC (at least, that’s what they say). Seems a bit of a revolution to me…

iProcessing is an open programming framework to help people develop native iPhone applications using the Processing language. It is an integration of the Processing.js library and a Javascript application framework for iPhone. The iProcessing downloadconsists of a set of example XCode projects that demonstrate many of the Basic Examples from the Processing web site (originally written by Casey Reas and Ben Fry unless otherwise stated) as well a number that demonstrate the use of various iPhone features such as multitouch, accelerometer, orientation, location, sound play/record, app state saving and so on.