Processing, Eclipse, Etc

I’ve been working in Processing for at least 3 years now. Besides basic HTML and CSS, it was how I began to learn what programming was.

As I’m sure with everyone starting out working with Processing, one would use the provided PDE (Processing Development Environment). However, once I started moving into more serious programming in Java, I started to use Eclipse as my IDE.

As my progression continued with coding and Processing, I did see that some people were using Eclipse to develop Processing applications, but the PDE was still serving my purposes just fine, until I started a recent project. I’m currently working on migrating a system from VirTools over to a Processing application that will interface with Unity3D for my professor Semi Ryu.

I decided to make the switch over to Eclipse for this project, and there is a plugin that makes life a lot easier. Introducing Proclipsing. Now I have all the benefits of Eclipse like code completion and syntax checking that speeds up the process of developing an app. No longer do I have to make a change to the code, click “Run”, see if it compiles, and watch my handywork like I did in PDE.

Once this project is done, I would like to jump into Ruby-Processing. It extends Processing even more using the power of Ruby. Here are some features:

• Live Coding: change your variables and methods on the fly.
• A control panel library to create tactile controls for sketch variables.
• The fact that it is Ruby.

Now we will just have to wait until Processing 2.0 to come out.