Processing sketches in an IDE.

Context

Processing has made Java Swing programming wonderfully accessible. The official editor is great for quick sketches, but the team has prioritised the robustness of the library over building a fully-featured IDE — and rightly so.

This post is about pairing the powers of the Processing library with an awesome IDE — in my case IntelliJ Community Edition — by depending on the Processing library from a Gradle project.

The bootstrap project lives at github.com/nikpappas/processing-gradle-bootstrap. Clone it, open it in IntelliJ, run the sketch — and you have refactoring, search, debug breakpoints and version control on top of the Processing API.