MAT259 Visualizing Information(4 units)


George Legrady
Charlie Roberts

Lecture: Tuesday 10:00-12:00, Lab: Thursday 10:00-12:00 - e-studio/Arts2220

In lab today we looked at how to access XML files, in particular RSS feeds. For a good overview of RSS I recommend the 'Quick Syntax' section of the Wikipedia XML article:

To bring the XML information into Processing, we used the ProXML library, which you can download at the link below:

To install the proxml library, simply download it and then place the unzipped 'proxml' folder into the libraries folder of your Processing app. The path should look something like this:

Processing123 > libraries > proxml

Below are code examples from class, complete with comments. The first example simply reads the titles of personal ads from Craigslist. The second example shows how to read the attributes of XML elements, and the third example shows how to read text children that might be inside XML elements.

The assignment due next Thursday (1/25/07) is to create an animation using data extracted from a rss feed or an xml file. The rss and xml that you choose to use cannot be data sources used in class (not that simple recipe example and not Craigslist). Try to use a different animation than you created for the last lab... see if you can create something more interesting.