The ever wonderful John Resig finally posted his totally awesome processing.js code to the web. If you haven’t seen it, you should go take a look. The Wired Compiler blog said “…this might be the most impressive thing we’ve ever seen.” And I agree, but probably not for the same reasons that they cite.
For a long time we’ve seen a niche on the web being filled by proprietary solutions. So-called rich internet graphics have long been the domain of Flash, before that Java (with limited success), ActiveX and now Microsoft is trying to jam Silverlight onto the world. However, each of these technologies suffers from one fatal flaw: they are, as a friend often described, deeply opaque. If you’re a developer for one of these technologies you’re on your own. You have to engage in a huge amount of training, the tools are often expensive or are difficult to use and then you are locked into a very specific platform. The bar for entry as a creator is very high. I think that Brendan would not mind me using his words to describe these technologies: Ivory Towers.
But the web is different. I’ve recently taken to describe the web as the world’s largest open source project because of its inherent transparency. Someone else doing something really interesting? Take a look at the source and copy it. Improve on it. Share it with others. As a developer for the web you aren’t alone. You have the work of thousands of others to draw upon. And the bar for entry is still about as low as you can get: a text editor. The web is smothered with information on how to develop for the web from the simplest HTML to advanced AJAX including everything from the front end to back end server work. It’s a highly democratized process, one that anyone can invest in and learn with no barriers for entry.
So back to processing.js. What John has done (in his spare time!) is to start to expose the capabilities of what we’ve been slowly adding to the platform of the web and give people a way to start to explore what we can really do. Canvas is here and it works. Video and audio have already landed in a couple of other browsers and we’ll have it soon enough. And each of them is exposed in the lingua franca of the web: transparent declarative markup connected by simple interactive scripts that are distributed as source.
We’re already starting to see the results. John released his code on Thursday. By Friday, someone had already duplicated the processing.js environment as a XUL program and someone else already created an editor where you can try out processing scripts directly on the web. That’s in one day after the code was posted on the web.
Just imagine for a second if those sites let people share and display neat little graphical widgets with source where people can try out different objects and learn from each other’s source code. Easy to drop in graphical interactive elements into other sites with the same transparency and zero-barrier to learning we’ve seen from the rest of the web. Think about how fast that stuff might spread on the web, how we might end up with people sharing and learning together and how much better the experience on the web might be in the end. That iterative process is one that needs starting points and what John has done is give us a great starting point.
So the world is changing. And changing quickly. The web is going to win, filling the market niche where Flash and other similar technologies found their hold. And John’s little project can hopefully act as a great catalyst to take us there. Thanks, John!
