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

Stressing the canvas and displaying the FPS


After seeing the last recipe, you might be thinking "Is there a limit to how many microbes we can animate?" The straightforward answer to this question is yes. As the 2D context of the HTML5 canvas is not hardware-accelerated, and as our animations are driven purely by JavaScript, there is definitely a point where the browser will start to choke if it's working overtime. To illustrate this, we can draw the FPS of our animation and observe the relationship between the number of microbes on the screen and the FPS value.

How to do it...

Follow these steps to stress the canvas and display the FPS:

  1. Link to the Animation class:

    <head>
        <script src="animation.js">
        </script>
  2. Define the drawFps() function that draws the FPS value in the top-right corner of the canvas:

            function drawFps(anim, fps){
                var canvas = anim.getCanvas();
                var context = anim.getContext();
                
                context.fillStyle...