SUMMARY
The requestAnimationFrame is a simple but elegant tool that allows JavaScript to tap into the rendering cycle of the browser in order to efficiently perform visual manipulation of the page.
The HTML5 <canvas> element provides a JavaScript API for creating graphics on the fly. Graphics are created in a specific context, of which there are currently two. The first is a 2D context that allows primitive drawing operations:
- Setting fill and stroke colors and patterns
- Drawing rectangles
- Drawing paths
- Drawing text
- Creating gradients and patterns
The second is a 3D context called WebGL. WebGL is a browser port of OpenGL ES 2.0, a language frequently used by game developers for computer graphics. WebGL allows far more powerful graphics processing than the 2D context, providing:
- Vertex and fragment shaders written in OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL)
- Typed array support, limiting the type of data contained in an array to specific numeric types
- Texture creation and manipulation
The...
