Dojo: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 8. Animation and Special Effects

Animation can add a splash of character to an otherwise bland application. This chapter systematically works through the animation utilities that are built right into Base as well as the dojo.fx (pronounced "effects") module that Core provides. This chapter includes a lot of source code and the bulk of the content builds upon only a few other concepts covered in earlier chapters. As such, this chapter may prove useful as a near-standalone reference.

Animation

The toolkit provides animation facilities in Base and supplements them with additional functionality offered through dojo.fx. The stock functionality offered by Base includes _Animation, a class that acts as a delegate in that it fires callbacks according to its configuration; these callback functions are what manipulate properties of a node so that it animates. Once instantiated, all that has to be done to execute an _Animation is to invoke its play method.

Warning

The leading underscore on the _Animation class currently designates at least two things:

• The API isn't definitively final yet, although it is really stable and probably will not change much (if any) between version 1.1 of the toolkit and when it does become final.

• You generally won't be creating an _Animation directly. Instead, you'll rely on auxiliary functions from Base and dojo.fx to create, wrap, and manipulate them on your behalf. You will, however, usually need to run their play methods to start them.

Simple Fades

Before delving ...