Using Processing with Eclipse

Alex — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:57:36 +0000

Recently I blogged about how I was going to start to use Processing. Since then I have realised that the Processing application is way too basic for me. Using Eclipse or Flash Builder much of the time I naturally looked to see if there was a way of bringing in Processing to the Eclipse environment, and very quickly I found the following link: http://www.creativecoding.org/en/beyond/p5/eclipse_as_editor (link no longer active)

Since Processing uses Java, I decided to download the standard Eclipse package. Following the instructions from the link above I quickly got a simple applet working. However I came across a couple of minor issues. Now I used to use Java, but many years ago, so I was quite rusty regarding the Java language, but when I create a simple applet, I immediately got this error…

The serializable class Table2 does not declare a static final serialVersionUID field of type long Table2.java /Table2/src line 4 Java Problem

Now, for me, who does loads of actionscript, the above message is meaningless. However, right-mouse clicking on the warning symbol and choosing Quick Fix gave a list of options…

Quick fix in Eclipse

… I chose the Add suppress warnings options and the following line was added…

@SuppressWarnings(“serial”)

The warning has now gone, and my applet runs.

I have no idea what the warning refers to, and I am sure that when I last did Java I never came across this, but hey! it works.

I will go through the little applet that I created soon, just to show you how to create a Processing applet within Eclipse, but the difference between using Eclipse and the actual Processing application is that the latter does all the work for you in creating a runnable Java applet, whilst with Eclipse you have to add the extra functions to make it a proper Java applet structure.

However, I personally prefer using Eclipse as I will get all the extra functionality that I need (Flash Builder plugin, other plugins, etc). Using the Processing application is just something I refuse to do – it is way too basic for me.

— alex

Processing – come along for the ride

Alex — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 10:06:39 +0000

Like a lot of people, I suspect, I tend to buy books, download source files, and squirrel them away somewhere, saying to myself – I will read them, I will go through the files – and, inevitably, you don’t.

However, this being a new year and all, I thought in order to push myself to learn something new, why not blog about it and take everybody along for the ride.

And for this purpose I have chosen to learn Processing – and I have also chosen to start with this book…

The Essential Guide to processing for Flash developers

By Ira Greenberg

…I bought this book in pdf format from the friendsofed website recently and I will use it to to start the whole thing off – I plan to blog my experiments, problems, thoughts, etc for you all to see. I will be using an iMac 3.06 Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 Gb ram, running Snow Leopard (10.6.2).

Why did I choose to learn Processing? Because the artwork coming out from some people looks fantastic and it looks to be fun. Processing itself is free, and although I have yet to get to grips with the code for Processing, it is based on java, and actionscript/javascript are similar, so I am hoping it will not be too much of a headache to learn.

Here is the main processing website…

http://processing.org/

Have a look around there and you will see what I mean.

Bye for now and expect to see my first experiment soon.

The Highlander Blog » computational art

Using Processing with Eclipse

Processing – come along for the ride