A student from my Mixing and Remixing Information class  is interested in using Processing ("an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions") in his project.  I've been wondering what capabilities Processing has in terms of consuming web services.  Here's what I've found so far.

First I found a script that accesses the delicious API in processing using a  java module:

http://processing.org/hacks/hacks:delicious

So it seems like writing Java libraries to extend processing is a possibility.

For some purposes, a simpler way is to use the loadStrings function with URLs.  Since loadStrings handles URLs , we should be able to do at least HTTP GET

See examples of using loadStrings

http://itp.nyu.edu/~dbo3/cgi-bin/ClassWiki.cgi?ICM_Net

The following iss supposed to work– but I couldn't get it to do so

http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/p5/flickr_rainbow_links_fixed/applet/index.html

The source should still be useful.

http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/p5/flickr_rainbow_links_fixed/applet/flickr_rainbow_links_fixed.pde