The topic of data visualization was brought up a couple of time before (1, 2) on this site. Data visualization is becomming a very hot area of research for user experience experts. Personally, I find the field fascinating.

While researching data visualization a while back I discovered the Java processing language which is an open source project at processing.org. The Java processing language is a really well designed domain specific language that can be used to quickly create data visualizations that have wonderful designer aesthetics. The data visualizations run in the Java virtual machine as applets in your browser. It shows that Java is still in the running as a RIA.

The language itself is elegant and easy to learn - its basically Java with short hand operations for creating 2D effects. I've really enjoyed playing with it and recommend it to anyone considering data visualization.

As an experiment I attempted to emulate a couple of the Java processing language programs in Curl. In a short time, I was able to create a couple of Curl applets that closely resemble their Java processing language counter parts.

For example, I created Curl Flowers which is a close approximation to the original Flower application written by Kevin Middleton in the Java processing language.

I also wrote a program called Smokerings which is fair attempt to mimic the behavior of the Meander application written by P.J. Onori in the Java processing language.

I've always believed that Curl would make a great data visualization platform. It's so powerful that it could handle some really huge data sets and it has first class 2D and 3D libraries.

You can run the curl applications and see the source code at my web site.

Read more from Richard Monson-Haefel.