Overview. A short introduction to the Processing software and
projects from the community. Processing is a programming
language, development environment, and online community. Since
2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the
visual arts and visual literacy within technology. Initially
created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach computer
programming fundamentals within a visual context, Processing
evolved into a development tool for professionals. Processing is
a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools
with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and
individual students. Its open source status encourages the
community participation and collaboration that is vital to
Processing's growth. Contributors share programs, contribute
code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build
libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The
Processing community has written over one hundred libraries to
facilitate computer vision, data visualization, mu