Processing: Fun With Visualization
Thanks to a number of Tim Oreilly's
tweets a few months ago, I've
recently become interested in MIT's
Processing language. The language
itself is really easy to pickup for anyone who codes in a C style
syntax on a regular basis. But one thing that's really exciting about
it to me is the ease with which one can generate visualizations that
will run on a number of platforms or as a Java applet within a browser for
distribution on the web.
I've always had an interest in standard data visualization methods
(mostly standard graphing techniques) for monitoring various things:
network data sources like traffic flow, computer system state, code
project metrics, sensor networks, etc.. It looks to me like the
processing approach to visualization can be concurrently more precise,
abstract, and artistic.
Anyway, just started playing with some of the
exercises. Nothing
particularly interesting yet, but I'll be adding more as time goes on.