In Processing Hack Week news...this past week, I've received two replies to my requests for task lists from the various Processing derivative projects. One from the Ruby-Processing developer and the other from the Clojure-Processing developer. The other news is that the GIT-repo for Processing is coming together.
The News
First, Ruby-Processing's task list has been assembled and it looks straight-forward. The work is mostly making sure that all Processing methods work in Ruby, and some documentation needs to be written as well as some more example sketches written.
Second, Clojure-Processing's task list is on the way and I should have it by next week. It looks like there's only maintenance work to be done. That means filling in a few gaps of functionality, and maybe unit-tests or whatever.
I'll post the tasks list soon...I'd like to gather some more items/bugs for the core Processing code base.
OhProcessing
Third, and perhaps the most important news, I'm doing a partial fork of the Processing project. It's only a partial fork because I'm only converting the SVN repo to a GIT repo that is hosted at GitHub. I'm calling it OhProcessing and the reason for this is that GIT allows new branches to be created quickly and easily. Another reason for this is that the SVN repo weighed in at more than 100MB. Windows XP was saying it was something like 400MB on disk. The SVN repo includes many JAR files that are fairly large, like the whole Java Runtime Environment which is needed for the distribution of Processing.
The OhProcessing minor fork has removed most, if not all, of the JAR files. I have assembled a list of dependencies for the core code and for the libraries included with the main distribution so that you can install them on your own. This makes the GIT repo much smaller, though it forces a developer to do a bit more work before they can compile Processing.
I am also changing the build process from shell scripts and a Perl script to use SCons which introduces another dependency: Python. This is acceptable as it replaces the previous Perl dependency and the SCons build system simplifies the build files. The build process is going to be a few different phases: compilation of the core environment, compilation of the core libraries, and packaging of a Processing distribution. The idea is that after the compilation steps, the packaging will copy the Java Runtime Environment and the other JAR files created for the core and the libraries into a distribution ZIP or TAR.GZ or whatever.
Anyway, I think this minor GIT-based fork is a win for Processing, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it.
