Creating a dynamic animated E - Noticeboard with processing

sunnixx

Hello I am working on a final year project for my undergraduates. I need to make a nice slick animated UI for a digital noticeboard for our university. I need help to kick start on this, as while searching over the internet I came across processing and saw that this language is really good when it comes to animation. But I seriously have no experience with it. I need to get some things cleared before really jumping into processing.

1. Can processing work with a database i.e. MySQL ?
2. Is processing the right choice for this type of project ?
3. Any nice tuts for processing ?

Thank you for the response (If anyone gives :P ).

akiersky

Hi sunnixx!

To answer your questions first;

1. Processing can load files from the internet, I usually try to have the database provide a .json file as they are pretty easy to parse with the built in tools.
2. Processing is a great choice, I've used it many times for very similar projects, both large and small scale.
3. The tutorials on processing.org/learning are great for learning the many different things processing can do, and have some good programming advise. hello.processing.org is great if you have never programed before. Best of all, because Processing is really just a Java library, you can search for Java tutorials and, for the most part, they will apply to any processing projects.

Depending on the languages you are familiar with, processing may or may not be the right choice for your project. For example if you know some Actionscript or another Object oriented language, Processing is a great choice. If you are coming from the HTML/CSS world, it may be a bit harder to convert that knowledge to Java/Processing. If you know some C++ or similar, you may want to look into OpenFrameworks or Cinder, which are kind of the Processing equivalents in C++. They will, in the end, give you much more power, speed, etc. But if you don't know C++ then they could be a harder leap to start into.

Sounds like a fun project! The best part of Processing, from my experience, is this forum and the community. There are lots of very helpful people, and if you are able to break down your problems and provide a starting point of where you are in an issue, it is quite common to get fully coded solutions.

Hope this helps, aaron

KevinWorkman

I would highly suggest starting much smaller. Can you get a Processing sketch to load some canned data from a database? Can you get two Processing sketches loading form a database? Can you get a Processing sketch to write to a database? Can you get your second sketch reading what the first wrote?

This is not a trivial project, and breaking your problem down into much smaller pieces is going to be the key to actually getting something done.