Processing is an open project initiated by Ben Fry (of MIT fame) and Casey Reas (UCLA Design). From the processing.org web page:
Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.
I have been dabbling with it for a while and have come to like it’s simplicity. The downside is that it sometimes demands a lot from your computer’s processing power.
How it works
The link data for this sketch was collected with a Python script. 250 government web sites were crawled and links to other web sites on the list were recorded. This generated some 2000 links which were fed to the Processing sketch.
The resulting visualization applet can be viewed here. Please note that it will require some processing power to get it running smoothly. You can also view a screenshot of the sketch in action.
Every site starts out as a small disc at the bottom of the screen. More incoming links makes the site grow. Larger sites float to the top of the screen. Smaller sites move out of the way for larger sites. Hovering with your mouse over a site highlights outgoing links from that site to other sites.
Findings
- Most inbound links go to the central government web site www.regeringen.se.
- Clusters are formed for museum web sites that link heavily to each other.
- Java 2D is slow.
The next step is to try PyOpenGL and see if speed can be improved when drawing hese simple 2D primitives. Initial tests looks promising.