The purpose of the project has been to "promote software literacy within the visual arts" and it was "created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context."
Ben Fry sums up one of the driving influences for the development of Processing:
"... damned if we’re gonna make students learn how to write a method declaration and “public class Blah extends PApplet” before they can get something to show up on the screen."Processing works by translating the simplified DSL to Java code, allowing Processing apps to run embedded in browsers as Java applets and anywhere else Java can be found.
some interactive demos: valence, ecosystems, four-letter words , alphabot
many more examples here.
Processing has also been embraced by the physical computing community in projects such as Reactable (demo video).
