It is worth noting that after a lengthy Alpha period, the Beta of Processing was recently released. Processing is a fantastic environment for graphical programming, and serves as a great introduction to Java. About a third of the pieces on bodytag were built using Processing.
A testament to its power and ease of use came when we needed to develop a pie-chart visualisation of site usage for a major corporate client - we tried many many commercial and free Flash and Java solutions, but most produced charts too ugly for us to associate with, and the others mysteriously refused to work on the client's particular workstation configurations. Close to throwing in the towel, I gave Processing (then Proce55ing) a bash, and within 10 minutes I had exactly what we needed - another 10 minutes and we had frills like rollover interactivity and audio.
For me personally, perhaps the most important aspect was that Processing gives you access to the raw pixel buffer for the screen, something that many languages like to abstract away behind a useless collection of drawing functions.
I've since moved on to doing a lot of artwork in C++, but Processing remains as an important part of my arsenal, and like Python, it fills me with pure 'coding joy' each time I use it. Highly Recommended.
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