If you’re looking for a cool way to implement graphics in a Java applet for the web, look no further than Processing! If you just want some neat visualizations to look at rather than doing work, look no further than Processing! If you just like pretty pictures…well, you get it.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

What this actually means is that they make it relatively easy to create really really pretty java applets for whatever you can think of. A couple of cool examples of this are Thinking Machine 4 and zipdecode. Thinking Machine gives you a real time view of what goes on in a Chess program as it enumerates all its movement choices and eventually decides upon one. Zipdecode gives you a real time, zooming view of where US ZIP codes are geographically. Start typing your ZIP code in and see what happens. Both of these use graphics abilities I had no idea Java applets had.

The neatest thing I’ve seen in Processing lately is The Dumpster. By combining the nifty graphics of processing with a ton of blog posts about breaking up that were scraped from the web, you can both see and compare the heartbreaks of thousands. By clicking around you can pick a breakup and see how all the other breakups relate to it. It’s a really neat way to visualize a ridiculous amount of information. And it gives you a chance to feel a little superior to complete strangers. Cool, huh?