____        _                 ____                              _             
|  _ \ _   _| |__  _   _      |  _ \ _ __ ___   ___ ___  ___ ___(_)_ __   __ _ 
| |_) | | | | '_ \| | | |_____| |_) | '__/ _ \ / __/ _ \/ __/ __| | '_ \ / _` |
|  _ <| |_| | |_) | |_| |_____|  __/| | | (_) | (_|  __/\__ \__ \ | | | | (_| |
|_| \_\\__,_|_.__/ \__, |     |_|   |_|  \___/ \___\___||___/___/_|_| |_|\__, |
                   |___/                                                 |___/ 

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