What is the current state of the art in HTML canvas JavaScript libraries and frameworks? [closed]

Answer 1

three.js, by mr. doob, is a fantastic 3d engine for javascript that includes scenegraph (both software and WebGL/hardware accelerated versions), shading, particles, skinned animation (i think), and lighting effects. Check it out, he is a super-talented fellow.

I should add that you are going to need the newest Google Chrome or equivalent to view most of the demos, one of my favorites is: http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/webgl_materials_cars.html

Answer 2

Been working with bHive to produce graphs and moving site headers, seems impressive and powerful, unlike the others seems to be being developed. Adobe Edge is also worth a gander though strictly not Canvas.

http://www.bhivecanvas.com

and

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/

Answer 3

Also, young, but not bad, Javascript framework, and it (complex animation, managing scene graphs, handling events and user interactions) all about it - jCanvaScript. May be, except 'managing scene graphs'.

Answer 4

I'm surprised no one has mentioned WebGL, and frameworks built on it. I would consider it high on the list for state-of-the-art for 3D GPU-accelerated graphics and complex animation on HTML canvas / javascript.

WebGL is a cross-platform, royalty-free web standard for a low-level 3D graphics API based on OpenGL ES 2.0, exposed through the HTML5 Canvas element as Document Object Model interfaces. ...

WebGL brings plugin-free 3D to the web, implemented right into the browser. Major browser vendors Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), Mozilla (Firefox), and Opera (Opera) are members of the WebGL Working Group.

WebGL is very solid in its support for GPU-accelerated graphics. Check out these GLSL shader demos. :-) And see ChemDoodle as an example of user interaction.

I've been working on an app using Google's O3D framework, which manages the scene graph, and uses WebGL for rendering (it used to use its own plug-in). O3D is a work in progress, and its documentation is not completely up to date, but it is under active development, and there are some good demos out there. 3D Pool may be most up your alley. The Google developers are very responsive to questions in the discussion group.

There are a number of other frameworks built on WebGL; see here. Ones that mention game development and scene graphs include Copperlicht, SceneJS, X3DOM.

WebGL runs in recent development builds of several browsers, but not IE. I've been using Firefox ("Minefield") and Chromium with good results. You will need one of these to run the above demos.

However if your requirements are that it must have no dependencies beyond HTML 5 canvas / js, WebGL may not be the right choice. It doesn't look like IE will support it anytime soon.

Update: after putting up a lot of resistance, MS decided to support WebGL in IE 11.

Answer 5

Take a look at the processingjs framework. Also the upcoming mootools version 2.0 has the art projekt to work with canvas

Answer 6

Raphael seems a pretty good canvas library; it's SVG-based (or VML-based in Internet Explorer), and thus supports a lot of user input events. It's fairly small (60kb gzipped), so isn't too large a dependency.
It seems to have a nice tweener too: http://raphaeljs.com/reference.html#animate (see here and here for examples).

For an example of what it can do, have a look at this clever little demo.

Hope this helps!