Recently, I dusted off my copy of “The Computational Beauty of Nature” and started rediscovering this still wonderful book. The chapter about IFS fractals inspired me to do some experimenting with animated fractal shapes. An opportune moment to learn more about Processing! After playing with it for a few hours, I have to say, this is a wonderful programming environment for this kind of visual experiments. Virtually no boilerplate code, cumbersome project setup, etc. Just start hacking away on your ideas. Based on Java, it is not a toy language either, so all the usual data structures and OOP constructs are readily available.

An additional treat: With processing.js, it is quite easy to run a processing application in a browser. See the IFS animation demo in the new demo section on the left (hope to add more to that category soon 🙂 ). Support is not complete, though: I had to rewrite my demo to some extent, because processing.js doesn´t support the PShape class very well yet, which is quite essential to get good performance in a particle system demo… so I reduced the visuals a bit. Still, much easier than having to go through and translate everything to JavaScript myself!