DPS909 Project - Processing.js – v0.1

Last month on [insert name of media production here]...

First, a brief recap. This semester at Seneca College I am taking a course revolving around open source development. As part of the course the students (yours truly being no exception) were nudged into getting involved in some Mozilla related projects, produce code for the real world, and see fist hand how the whole open source thing works.

I chose to work on Processing.js (Pjs), a JavaScript port of the Java-based Processing. More specifically, I volunteered to work on porting over the functions pushStyle(), popStyle(), and boolean().

I've got to release something...!

Today I get to make my first (course mandated) release! And this is what it does (trotting out this little “demo" for the third time):




What's that? That, fine feathered friends, is pushStyle() and popStyle() working just a little bit. Nothing particularly amazing, it's just the Processing example copied verbatim.

A start on the boolean() code is also in the release, but it's not tested at all.

For those of you who want to see for yourself may:

• Download the full Pjs library (my patched version)
OR

• Download just the patch

Toward 0.2

The march to enlightenment continues, and there is still much to do. The implementation of pushStyle() and popStyle() remains incomplete as demonstrated by this discussion on the Pjs Google Group. So far I have only saved the state of canvas variables, and not those in the library itself.

Then I need to see about putting through a more expansive test regimen. And there's already a bug: using Andrew Peace's test case, the “more pops than pushes" error alert just keep popping up. I like to think the intended behaviour is for a finite number of warnings.

On the other hand, boolean() seems much more straight forward to test.

A not-so-secret society

v0.1 releases just in time for this years Free Software and Open Source Symposium hosted by Seneca College. This is particularly important because Al MacDonald, Pjs project leader, is attending FSOSS and will no doubt want to have a few words with those DPS909 students working on Pjs.

David Humphrey suggested us students might want to look into setting up a Pjs bug tracker, discuss ways to compile our seperate test suites into one big suite, and perhaps set up a website to showcase the newly ported capabilities. I figure even if I somehow manage to get my project done way ahead of schedule there will not be a lack of things to do.