Book Image

HTML5 Canvas Cookbook

By : Eric Rowell
Book Image

HTML5 Canvas Cookbook

By: Eric Rowell

Overview of this book

The HTML5 canvas is revolutionizing graphics and visualizations on the Web. Powered by JavaScript, the HTML5 Canvas API enables web developers to create visualizations and animations right in the browser without Flash. Although the HTML5 Canvas is quickly becoming the standard for online graphics and interactivity, many developers fail to exercise all of the features that this powerful technology has to offer.The HTML5 Canvas Cookbook begins by covering the basics of the HTML5 Canvas API and then progresses by providing advanced techniques for handling features not directly supported by the API such as animation and canvas interactivity. It winds up by providing detailed templates for a few of the most common HTML5 canvas applications—data visualization, game development, and 3D modeling. It will acquaint you with interesting topics such as fractals, animation, physics, color models, and matrix mathematics. By the end of this book, you will have a solid understanding of the HTML5 Canvas API and a toolbox of techniques for creating any type of HTML5 Canvas application, limited only by the extent of your imagination.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
HTML5 Canvas Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Canvas Security
Index

Creating a bar chart


Right behind pie charts, bar charts are another popular tool for visualizing data. In this recipe, we'll create a configurable Bar Chart class that takes in an array of data elements and creates a simple bar chart. We'll reuse the data structure from the previous recipe to compare the results. Like the Pie Chart class, the bar chart drawing methods also automatically scale the chart to fill up the canvas.

How to do it...

Follow these steps to create a Bar Chart class that can automatically position and size a bar chart from an array of data:

  1. Define the BarChart constructor which draws the chart:

    /*
     * BarChart constructor
     */
    function BarChart(config){
        // user defined properties
        this.canvas = document.getElementById(config.canvasId);
        this.data = config.data;
        this.color = config.color;
        this.barWidth = config.barWidth;
        this.gridLineIncrement = config.gridLineIncrement;
        /*
         * adjust max value to highest possible value divisible
         * by the...