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

Introduction


Originally, when I first started writing this book, I had intended on only covering the 2D context of the HTML5 canvas (I strongly believe that most people who use canvas will be working with this context). I had also originally intended on covering techniques for rendering 3D shapes in the 2D context using 3D projection methods and vector operations. People were already busy creating some pretty incredible 3D JavaScript libraries for the 2D context, including Kevin Roast's K3D library (one of the reviewers of this book), and also Dean McNamee's Pre3d library.

As I neared writing this chapter, WebGL—a true 3D context—began to dominate 3D canvas demos across the Web. WebGL stands for Web-Based Graphics Library, and it's based on OpenGL ES 2.0 which provides an API for 3D graphics. Because WebGL leverages hardware acceleration by pushing buffers directly onto the graphics card to render 3D models, it performs much better than its 2D context, 3D projection library counterparts....