____ _ ____ _
| _ \ _ _| |__ _ _ | _ \ _ __ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___(_)_ __ __ _
| |_) | | | | '_ \| | | |_____| |_) | '__/ _ \ / __/ _ \/ __/ __| | '_ \ / _` |
| _ <| |_| | |_) | |_| |_____| __/| | | (_) | (_| __/\__ \__ \ | | | | (_| |
|_| \_\\__,_|_.__/ \__, | |_| |_| \___/ \___\___||___/___/_|_| |_|\__, |
|___/ |___/
Ruby-Processing is a Ruby wrapper for the Processing code art framework. It's
this thin little shim that squeezes between Processing and JRuby, passing
along some neat goodies like:
* Applet and Application exporting of your sketches. Hand them out to
your party guests, ready-to-run.
* Live Coding via JRuby's IRB. Loads in your sketch so you can futz with
variables and remake methods on the fly.
* Bare sketches. Write your Ruby-Processing sketches without having to define
a class. Without defining methods, even.
* A "Control Panel" library, so that you can easily create sliders, buttons,
checkboxes and drop-down menus, and hook them into your sketch's instance
variables.
* "Watch" mode, where Ruby-Processing keeps an eye on your sketch and reloads
it from scratch every time you make a change. A pretty nice REPL-ish way
to work on your Processing sketches.
If some quality time with Ruby is your idea of a pleasant afternoon, or you
harbor ambitions of entering the fast-paced and not altogether cutthroat world
of Code Art, then Ruby-Processing is probably something you should try on for
size. You can grab it as a gem:
sudo gem install ruby-processing
~ But Processing? ~
Processing is an MIT-developed framework for making little code artifacts,
animations, visualizations, and the like, developed originally by Ben Fry
and Casey Reas, supported by a small army of open-source contributors.
Processing has become a sort of standard for visually-oriented programming,
strongly influencing the designs of Nodebox, Shoes, Arduino, and other kindred
projects. For more information, take a look at http://processing.org/
~ What does it look like? How does it smell? ~
Processing provides a tidy API, with a bunch of handy methods you can call
from Ruby-Processing. Here's a smattering:
alpha, arc, background, blend, blue, ellipse, frame_rate, hue, lerp,
load_image, load_pixels, mouse_pressed, noise, rect, saturation, shape,
smooth, text_align, translate, triangle...
And so on, and so forth. See the full list here:
http://www.processing.org/reference/index_ext.html
~ How can I learn more? ~
For full, up-to-date info, always check the wiki:
http://wiki.github.com/jashkenas/ruby-processing