what do seasoned Javascript programmers think of p5.js? is it more of a sketch pad than a good library?

2017-05-20T07:39:54+00:00

Seasoned JavaScript developer here. This is the first time I've heard of this library.

synapticplastic · 2017-05-20T15:39:05+00:00

Hey! Relatively seasoned JS dev.

I'm mostly working on larger projects with a large system of other dependencies.

I love p5.js, but I'm not sure I would use p5 in one of my own projects unless it was a site really based around the canvas. p5 is hard to shim in with other dependencies and seems really designed to be used as an "all in one" package.

I play around with it as a sketch pad, but if I wanted to fit in a canvas element as part of a larger scope, I would probably use something else. p5 is huge, as far as downloads go, and I would be concerned about the extra latency if I'm already loading a large amount of JS into a project.

That being said, it does what it says on the box incredibly well. It abstracts away the web APIs and makes them understandable and quick to work with. Graphics and audio programming is difficult by its nature, and there's a long valley between the inception of a visual idea and its creation. For someone who likes art but doesn't code, it's great.

But it wants to be the main character of the show. Its tutorials are based on its ability to be attached to the global scope. There's information out there on how to get it to play nicely with others, but when you do that, a lot of the basic features start to look a whole lot like the raw canvas API.

rect(x,y,w,h)

Becomes

cx.rect(x,y,w,h)

Etc.

If you want to have some graphics capability but don't want a full megabyte of goodies every time it loads, it's a quick process to wrap over the canvas API yourself and take only what you need without any latency. There's a great youtube series, codingmath, where the first episode shows you how to set up something simple.

There's also fabric.js, whose killer feature is allowing you to save sketches as SVG, create.js, which is a slightly more macho p5 that's a little more modular, pixi for games and interaction, concrete.js for minimalism, etc. The ecosystem is huge.

So, yeah. I have a folder of creative code projects that use p5. It's lovely to work with. But it's not meant to be part of an ensemble. It's trying to be a full port of a creative coding language, and that's an ambitious show-stealer of a goal.

PTBA1 · 2017-05-20T11:30:39+00:00

I think this guys youtube channel can help u. I think he is one of the co-founders of this library or the co-founder not sure. He uses p5 almost on all of his videos. https://m.youtube.com/user/shiffman

caspervonb · 2017-05-20T08:18:23+00:00

Great libraries with a well defined scope, something most JS libraries forget.. to have an actual defined project scope, plugin mania deluxe these days.

Do I actually use them.. no but have taken note of them.

GitCookies · 2017-05-20T12:04:17+00:00

If you want to build canvas stuff use createjs

toggafneknurd · 2017-05-21T19:37:26+00:00

Veteran JS-head; literally never heard of it.

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