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

Plotting data points with a line chart


If you've ever taken a science class, you're probably familiar with generating line charts based on a set of data for your experiments. Line charts are probably one of the most useful data visualizations when communicating data trends. In this recipe, we'll create a configurable Line Chart class which takes in an array of data elements and plots each point while connecting the points with line segments.

How to do it...

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

  1. Define the constructor for the LineChart class that draws the x and y axis:

    function LineChart(config){
        // user defined properties
        this.canvas = document.getElementById(config.canvasId);
        this.minX = config.minX;
        this.minY = config.minY;
        this.maxX = config.maxX;
        this.maxY = config.maxY;
        this.unitsPerTickX = config.unitsPerTickX;
        this.unitsPerTickY = config.unitsPerTickY;
        
        // constants...