Check out Ecosystem with p5.js

Back in 2012, I was experimenting with Processing, a programing language / environment optimized for generative art. My main output was ‘Ecosystem’ which I talked about here.

Processing was great but translated very poorly to the web, users had to view it through a Java applet. I tried an alternative, Processing.js, but it didn’t work well and the code seemed inefficient.

Last week I found p5.js which aims to follow Processing’s vision and make it live on the web. After poking around I decided to port Ecosystem over to p5.js

The transition wasn’t terrible but there were definitely some rough patches. The biggest change was replicating the Java-style objects and classes in Javascript. Other issues arose in converting the Vectors. Finally, there were some scope issues that I had to track down.

Overall, I’m happy with p5.js and would do another small project with it. For something more ambitious, I would probably use EaselJS

Ecosystem’s code is on GitHub here and a demo lives here