John Resig (of jQuery fame) released processing.js on Thursday. If you haven’t checked it out, you should! It is really impressive. On the newest versions of some browsers, and on the next version of others, it’s possible to pretty much duplicate the capabilities of Flash, but entirely using markup and Javascript.
The real excitement comes as this could be a blow to Flash, Silverlight, and company. Christopher Blizzard makes the points why this is so exciting on his blog:
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.
I think this is where it gets interesting. You can only go so far when you build a project, then when it’s completed, forget it, and never share it. 99% of our projects are this way. But the kind of thing that processing represents is real Web 2.0 – truly collaborative, exciting stuff! Unlike Flash or Silverlight, others will read the code, use it, share it, and probably credit us – spreading not only Molecular’s image as forward thinkers and great developers, but also the image and brands of our clients. What would happen if, throughout the years of all the projects we had done, other developers we never met could grab our work, and combine it in ways we couldn’t imagine? What if we could do it to our projects? What if we could leverage the work of others more effectively?
