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 an Animation class


As the HTML5 canvas API doesn't provide methods for animation, we'll have to create our own Animation class for handling an animation stage. This recipe will cover the basics of animation and provide an Animation class for all of our future animation projects.

Getting ready...

As browsers and computer hardware are not created equally, it's important to understand that the optimal FPS (Frames Per Second) value for each animation varies depending on the browser, the computer's hardware, and the animation's algorithm. Therefore, it would be quite difficult for a developer to figure out what the best FPS value is for each user. Fortunately, browsers are now implementing a requestAnimationFrame method of the window object which can automatically determine the best FPS for animations (thank goodness). As we'll see later in this chapter, a typical FPS value for a smooth animation is somewhere between 40 and 60 frames per second.

Take a look at the preceding diagram. To...