Dojo: The Definitive Guide

Summary

This chapter has systematically walked you through Base and Core's tools for animation. A splash of animation, when applied with discretion, can really add that extra bit of umph that distinguishes your application from the rest of the crowd. After reading this chapter, you should:

• Be able to use Base's utilities for fading nodes in and out

• Be able to use Base's animateProperty function to animate arbitrary CSS properties

• Understand the effect of easing functions, duration, and rate on an _Animation

• Be aware of Core's facilities that supplement the animation support provided by Base

• Be able to use Core's animation support for additional effects, including wipes and slides

• Be able to chain together animations to run sequentially with dojo.fx.chain as well as run multiple animations in parallel with dojo.fx.combine

• Be able to use dojo.fx.Toggler to hide and show a node via its simple, uniform interface

• Understand how to combine animations with drag-and-drop to create highly interactive page content

• Be able to create and effectively use Color objects to eliminate manual computation of color values in your code

  Tip

  There are amazing graphics and animation tools backed by SVG, VML, and Silverlight backends, provided through the dojox.gfx module.

We're going to cover data abstraction in the next chapter.