Education/Projects/ProcessingForTheWeb/Tasks

Summary

This page lists tasks to be done as part of the Processing For The Web project, in order to fully implement all of Processing in processing.js. The work is being led by David Humphrey and Al MacDonald, and done by students at Seneca College. You are welcome to join this work.

Task List

The following lists of Bugs, Features, and Functions was compiled by Al MacDonald.

Bugs

Bug	Description	Attachment/link	Difficulty
variable + space + semicolon	Defining a variable such as "float y ;" with a space between the number and the semicolon can cause regex parsing errors.		Difficult
// Comment	Using double slashed comments // at the end of any script will cause REGEX to loop on parsing, subsequently crashing browser. Quick solution is to add a blank line at the end of every script.		Difficult
mouseX & mouseY	mouseX and mouseY are returned as incorrect values when the canvas is a child of a relative element.		Medium
nf()	Using nf() on some numbers crashes FireFox. EG: String sf = nf(9.012, 3, 5); from http://processing.org/reference/color_datatype.html will not work.	dhodgin will look into this one, has an idea. also needs support for 3 args	Difficult
keyCode, CODED, etc	Keyboard functions need fleshing out and cross-browser/cross-platform testing.		Medium
The Angel Bug	When the regex parse encounters strings with a comma in, it parses the word before the comma as a variable. Work around is to escape strings... String myString = “this \, is a string”; But that is in no way ideal. More info: http://hyper-metrix.com/processing-js/docs/?page=Angels%20Weep		Difficult
Table bug	Processing.js demos will not render if they are in a table. However any canvas demo does.	Table test	Undetermined
Boolean array bug	Processing.js fails if an array of booleans is created with a variable defined before array.	Boolean array test	Undetermined
Overloading function bug			Undetermined
Drop frame system	A method to drop frames that are not drawn in time. This would be great for media-syncing if you want your app to stay in-time with audio and video. Not sure how plain-old JS timers will handle this... but it's worth testing		Medium
array.clone	looks like it only does a shallow copy and will cause issues with objects in an arrayList	dhodgin will look into this one and test	Unconfirmed

Missing Features

This is a list of all the out-standing functions in the Processing.js implementation. A more detailed description of the unfinished functions can be found at: http://processingjs.org/reference. (Click “toggle all” to see the list.)

3D Features

Name	Description	Who's working on it.	STATUS	Difficulty
initialization	All the required code to get a 3D context ready for rendering.	asalga		Difficult
curve()	Need the 3rd dimension here.	asob,dliu53(2D)]		Difficult
box()	And here.	asob		Difficult
sphere()	And here...	asob		Difficult
sphereDetail()	Yep... lots of 3D needed.			Difficult
rotateX()	Done the math. Not implemented in in Processing.js. See: http://hascanvas.com/Disco for example.	asob		Difficult
rotateY()	Done the math. Not implemented in in PJS. Superior code welcome.	asob		Difficult
rotateZ()	Done the math. Not implemented in in PJS. Superior code welcome.	asob		Difficult
ambientLight()	See lighthouse ticket
directionalLight()	See lighthouse ticket
lightFalloff()	See Lighthouse ticket
lightSpecular()	See Lighthouse ticket
lights()	See lighthouse ticket
noLights()	See lighthouse ticket
normal()	See lighthouse ticket
pointLight()	See lighthouse ticket
spotLight()	See lighthouse ticket
beginCamera()	See lighthouse ticket
camera()	See lighthouse ticket
endCamera()	See lighthouse ticket
frustrum()	See lighthouse ticket
ortho()	see lighthouse ticket
perspective()	See lighthouse ticket
printCamera()	See lighthouse ticket
printProjection()	See lighthouse ticket
modelX()	See lighthouse ticket
modelY()	See lighthouse ticket
modelZ()	See lighthouse ticket
screenX()	See lighthouse ticket
screenY()	See lighthouse ticket
screenZ()	See lighthouse ticket
ambient()	See lighthouse ticket
emissive()	See lighthouse ticket
shininess()	See lighthouse ticket
specular()	See lighthouse ticket
scale()	See lighthouse ticket
rotate()	See lighthouse ticket
translate()	See lighthouse ticket
hint()	See lighthouse ticket
PVector	See lighthouse ticket

Misc. Features

Name	Description	Who's working on it.	STATUS	Difficulty
delay()	Some exploration done... a couple of work-arounds found. A deeper look into this needed as the work-arounds did not function as expected in all situations due to the non-blocking nature of Javascript animation techniques.			Difficult
popStyle()	Requested by Google Group.	mlam	Awaiting code review,	Difficult
private	Worth the effort in Javascript? Maybe.
pushStyle()	Requested by Google Group.	mlam	Awaiting code review,	Difficult
cursor()	Some work finished and pushed to master.	asob		Medium
focused		andor		Easy
noCursor()		asob		Easy
online	Relevant in a Javascript environment? Perhaps.	MinyXO	finished	Easy
screen	Could be useful to get window.innerHeight etc?	dhodgin		Easy
long		dhodgin		Medium
Hashmap		MinyXO		Medium
XMLElement		Renaud, Raph (COMETE)		Medium
binary()		andor		Medium
boolean()		mlam	Awaiting code review,	Easy
hex()		Tyrant911		Easy
unbinary()		Tyrant911		Medium
unhex()		dhodgin	finished, checked-in	Easy
join()		Tyrant911		Easy
match()		MinyXO	finished	Medium
matchAll()				Medium
nfc()		dhodgin	finished	Easy
nfp()		Tyrant911		Easy
nfs()		dhodgin	finished, checked-in	Easy
trim()		MinyXO	finished	Easy
split()		MinyXO	finished	Easy
splitTokens()		MinyXO	finished	Easy
append()		MinyXO	finished	Easy
arrayCopy()		MinyXO	finished	Easy
concat()		Tyrant911		Easy
expand()		dhodgin	finished, checked-in	Easy
reverse()		Tyrant911		Easy
shorten()		andor		Easy
sort()		andor		Easy
splice()		andor		Easy
subset()		andor		Easy
PShape()	Started working on this myself (outside of PJS). Can parse most SVGs. A whole ton of quircks/bugs cross-browser that stop this in it's tracks in terms of a pure-implementation. Have been adding these to Apple, Opera, BugZilla as I go. More details if needed.			Difficult
bezierDetail()		andor		Difficult (While the math may be easy enough, it would be nice to have the browser handle this at the machine code level. Help from Fx dev team, new functionality please)?
bezierPoint()		andor		Difficult (While the math may be easy enough, it would be nice to have the browser handle this at the machine code level. Help from Fx dev team, new functionality please)?
bezierTangent()		andor		Difficult (While the math may be easy enough, it would be nice to have the browser handle this at the machine code level. Help from Fx dev team, new functionality please)?
curveDetail()				Difficult (While the math may be easy enough, it would be nice to have the browser handle this at the machine code level. Help from Fx dev team, new functionality please)?
curvePoint()				Difficult (While the math may be easy enough, it would be nice to have the browser handle this at the machine code level. Help from Fx dev team, new functionality please)?
curveTangent()				Difficult (While the math may be easy enough, it would be nice to have the browser handle this at the machine code level. Help from Fx dev team, new functionality please)?
curveTightness()				Difficult (ALREADY IN PJS, BUT.... it would be nice to have the browser handle this at the machine code level. Help from Fx dev team, new functionality please)?
noSmooth()	Possible/worth the processing with Canvas? Probably not. Feedback welcome.			Difficult (Another thing that would be nice if the Fx dev. team could provide this functionality)
strokeCap()		mlam		Medium
strokeJoin()				Medium
texture()				Difficult
textureMode()				Difficult
loadShape()	SVG function.			Difficult
shape()	SVG function.			Difficult
shapeMode()	SVG function.			Difficult
createInput()				Difficult
loadBytes()	Started working on this. Can read binary from file with JS using someone else's open-source. Not added into Processing.js yet.			Medium
open()				Impossible?
selectFolder()				Impossible?
selectInput()				Impossible?
param()	Needed in JS?			Medium
status()	Don't think Firefox will let you change status bar with JS re: security. NOTE: we can do this, but the user must set the dom.disable_window_status_change preference to false for it to show-up.			Medium?
save()	Some work done by Google group. Could be combined with binary functions ot HTML5 functions to write directly to server? One idea would be to use the canvas.toDataUrl() (you can specify a graphic mime type) in order to get a string that could then be written to localStorage, keyed on the filename.			Difficult
saveFrame()	As above in save(). Probably don't want to start saving TIFs in a web environment. Canvas exports png, gif, jpg natively already. Spec deviation from Processing proper may be wise. One idea would be to use the canvas.toDataUrl() (you can specify a graphic mime type) in order to get a string that could then be written to localStorage, keyed on the filename.			Difficult
PrintWriter	Saves text to file.			Difficult
beginRaw()				Difficult
beginRecord()				Difficult
createOutput()				Difficult
createReader()				Difficult
createWriter()				Difficult
endRaw()				Difficult
endRecord()				Difficult
saveBytes()	A saveBytess does not exists in processing.js. It should be similar to saveStrings()	Tyrant911		Difficult
saveStream()				Difficult
saveStrings()	A saveStrings does not exists in processing.js. It will emulate saving to a file with localStorage *html5* stuff. (I added this to this list.)	Tyrant911		Medium
loadStrings()	A loadStrings already exists in processing.js but it only accepts URL's so i'm going to add functionality so I can work with localStorage	Tyrant911		Medium
loadBytes()	A loadBytess does not exists in processing.js. It should be similar to loadStrings() (I added this to this list.)	Tyrant911		Medium
selectOutput()				Difficult
applyMatrix()				Difficult ( could return glMultMatrix()? )
printMatrix()				Medium
resetMatrix()		andor		Medium
blendColor()		dhodgin		Medium
brightness()		dliu53		Medium
hue()		dliu53		Medium
saturation()		dliu53		Medium
PImage()	Pimage is in the library but it would be great to get PJS loading the images into the DOM dynamically. This is also a fairly common request on the Google group.	annasob		Medium
imageMode()		MinyXO		Medium
noTint()		MinyXO		Medium
requestImage()	No sure if this is actually needed in JS as DOM image would load async anyway. Probably worth looking into a little more.			Medium
blend()		dhodgin		Medium
copy()		dhodgin		Medium
filter()		dhodgin		Medium
PGraphics	Could be worth-while to get PGraphics to use a separate canvas and getPixels() from it. Great for say... animating the mouth moving on one canvas before applying the result to a UV map for a 3D object.			Medium-Difficult
	Would this offer any performance/feature reward over using a reagular Javascript 1 dimensional array containing pixels?
PFont	Already working. The existing routines will likely get either a) merged with PShape's SVG functions or b) dropped in favor of something faster re: real browser fonts if we can borrow a little time from Mozilla developers. (We are currently using SVGs.)			Difficult (Fx dev. & talk to Bespin guys)
PVector	2D...3D vector should be returned.	medel	Implemented but still needs work.	Difficult
exp()		dhodgin	finished	Easy
log()		dhodgin	finished	Easy
mag()		andor		Easy
map()		dhodgin		Easy
acos()		dhodgin	finished	Easy
asin()		dhodgin	finished	Easy
atan()		dhodgin	finished	Easy