From a JavaFX point of view, an animation is a change of a property over a period of time; for example:
- If you want an object to move, you need to work with coordinate properties.
- If you want to shrink or enlarge an object, you can use the scale property.
- You can even use the Animation API for objects which don't have a visual representation at all.
You need the following three API classes to create an animation:
- KeyFrame represents a point in time
- KeyValue describes the value the desired property should have at the moment described by KeyFrame
- Timeline collects all KeyFrame objects and runs the animation, calculating all intermediate values for properties between KeyFrame objects.
In the next section, we will review these concepts with an example.