I often find that when trying to learn a new code base, a bug that allows you to travel far and wide across the system, yet one simple enough to get that feeling of achievement, is the best approach.  With this, you get to see much of what you will be working with, and at the end, you should hopefully have something to show for your meander around.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;” - William Shakespeare

Today I’ve released the first version of what I’m calling the Processing Design Elements (a working title) on GitHub. Processing Design Elements is written in and for Processing and works in applications and on the web. Fundamentally, it’s a set of classes that enable easy creation of various form element controls like text boxes and buttons.

This current version is labeled 0.1 and is the first rough draft of what I hope to achieve by the end. The code is a bit messy and is lacking documentation, but it contains most of the ideas and concepts that I’m trying to implement. I hope that this collection will be able to help future developers easily retrieve user input and that someone finds this mildly interesting.

The current development plan is to work out some documentation and work on each of the different controls. The code is partially (read poorly) commented and I have not made any usage instructions outside of the test application that comes with the v0.1 release. I’m hoping to put documentation either in a wiki or make a website for it in the very near future. Ideally I’d like to refine and write the documentation for at least one control per week.

As I mentioned above, this is the first release. Though there is a lot I still need to get done for it, I’d greatly appreciate any comments or suggestions that people have. This is partially a learning experience for me and feedback will help me focus this project and get it to a point where other people find it useful.

Finally I’d like to thank the Processing team without whom, none of this would have been possible.

Demo Page
Git Hub Repository
Processing.org

There is a known bug with the textbox adding int values instead of character pressed.