I don't if someone posted it before, but John Resig has ported processing 2d stuff to javascript using the canvas object. http://ejohn.org/blog/processingjs/

I spent about an hour looking at this last night. After recovering from the shock, I had many questions. How do you think people will use it? Is this an obvious question?

Ah. This reminds me of 1997, when Flash was just getting started (even when it was still FutureSplash Animator) and there were debates about the future of animation the Web. Would it be DHTML or Flash? Looks like the discussion might be opening again.

This is very very cool!

At first I thought it was just javascript interpreter from processing, but then I realized it was a complete rewrite of the processing 2D API in Javascript....verrrry cool.

I've just read this article related to John Resig's processing.js library. Bill Orcutt has created a new "processing" object for his visual programming environment called "Lily". More info is available here :

http://blog.lilyapp.org/2008/05/processing_js_1.html

http://www.lilyapp.org

let me add these 2 links
someChromeForPjs and obsessing

It is amazing the buzz that this has generated in a couple of days. Although I think it is fantastic someone took the initiative to do this, I don't fully get the viral ebullience. (Please feel free to enlighten/scold me here.) I do get the annoyance with the applet argument and even the javascript=democracy fervor. What I don't fully get though is the huge benefit that many see this providing (sorry). Of course, making my living primarily through the ivory tower, I don't have to please clients, meet standards or generally do anything with code that doesn't interest me (this is a bit of an exaggeration). I suspect if I needed to work in javascript I might find the processing api more convenient at times than simply writing standard javascript graphic calls, but I'm not sure that this benefit in itself would elicit the response that we're seeing. What's also a little strange about all this to me is that for years working in actionscript we could write simplified procedural (processsingesque) type calls, but the dev community somehow convinced mm/adobe to convert AS (in form) into a mutant variety of java?

So please somebody help this middle-aged guy learn to embrace this next thing.

Also for the hell of it, I decided to look at performance differences between applet/js. As you might suspect, the applet, for all its klunkyness, far outperforms js (warning, this may lock up your browser.) http://iragreenberg.com/pjs/

The main advantage I see is simply *not relying on Java*. Many people just don't have it any more, and many more are irritated every time they visit a page featuring a Java applet, because their computer seizes up for several seconds (sometimes much longer) and becomes far likelier to crash. Last time I checked there's still a long-standing bug in Firefox/Java where if you try to navigate away from a page with a Java applet during that not-working-right phase, the browser stops working properly (links are broken!) until you have shut it down, killed the process and started it again afresh.

So being able to show our sketches to people without inflicting Java on them is a great thing.

Of course, the performance hit in transferring to JS is pretty substantial, so it may not be as great as all *that*.

I still keep hoping that Sun or someone will eventually sort out Java so that it's a nice thing to have in a web browser, rather than something we have to suffer through to see Processing sketches and things, but we've been waiting for a while now.