The Processing Development Environment (PDE)

The processing development environment is a handy IDE for creating, compiling and executing processing programs. PDE is a text editor with menus for operations like compiling, running, etc, and a console area for printing error messages and execution statuses.

A program written using the Processing language is referred to as a ‘sketch’ and the whole program/project folder that consists of sketches and other resources is referred to as a ‘sketchbook’. Since processing adopts its programming style from Java, we can use any Java IDE to develop programs.

The package, Processing, is available for download from https://processing.org/download. Installation steps include downloading the proper Zip, based on the target operating system, and extracting it in a local directory. There is a wide range of built-in sample projects that explain the different features, and they can be accessed through Examples options in file menu in PDE.