I am REALLY interested in learning Processing I would love to create a Processing widget for my web site but I am at a disadvantage because I don't know Processing at all and I know only a tiny bit of Java!  I have looked at a dozen or so Processing projects that others have done and have spent oodles of hours trying to modify their code.  I'm pretty good at moding good code but the closest thing I've found to what I want to do was written by a self-proclaimed novice with several in-line comments like:

// This is my first java/processing code so don't blame me for some bad parts

and...

//thats was so dirty that i will not say my name.

Fair enough.  And all things considered I'm impressed that he was able to achieve what he did.  Perhaps he had the advantage of building his project from a code base of other less-novice coders.  But is there anything more doomed than one novice trying to modify another novice's code?!  I think that if the original code was well formed and logical I might have had a chance -- but it's not... so I'm stymied.  

Is there someone out there who could help me build a basic Processing app that I could then use as a basis for learning processing while working on a project that I could actually find useful?

The code that I've been struggleing with is a del.icio.us netowk connection explorer.  The app and code are at:

App:
http://www.twoantennas.com/projects/delicious-network-explorer/


Code:
http://www.twoantennas.com/projects/delicious-network-explorer/network_explorer.pde

I want to create a similar connection explorer except for a social networking site that I'm involved with.  However, instead of displaying Fan and Idol connection like the twoantennas app does, I want to be able to display various other types of connections like:

 Who referred who?

and

 Who belongs to which groups?

The site is still young and we have not defined all the connections yet or the data format for the processing app to read.  I reckon there are lots of options (db tables, txt files, XML, JSON, etc.)  We are ambivalent about which approach to use... we can do anything we need to.

Can anyone help me?

Much thanks!

Bob