I’d be interested in your ideas on how to make your sprites draggable with the mouse. Support click events and stuff.

 monk.e.boy

What about drawing of string?

Oh, and I’m actually getting better canvas performance in Firefox 3.5 than Chromium, despite V8 generally being faster than TraceMonkey, ATM. JavaScript VMs are optimized differently, so it’s not always an all or nothing advantage.

I created a “starfield” animation with doodle. Nothing complex but very easy in the implementation:

http://vs2062237.vserver.de/~phxx/stardoodle/

Superp framework, great job!

But to address a few of the comments:
I developed it using Chrome because it had the fastest Javascript engine at the time (and Firefox 3.5 isn’t out yet). I’d jump back into Firefox 3.0.8 and IE8 to make sure it rendered ok, but certainly there were performance issues because of the varying quality of the Javascript engines. I haven’t tested it with Safari personally, but I had a friend look at the examples with an iPhone and he said they ran — albeit slowly. If your experience differs I’d be interested in knowing (and others I’m sure).

This is definitely not meant to replace Flash. If you look around this site you’ll see I’ve used Flash plenty and have no desire to re-implement that Herculean task. I wanted to explore the canvas element and see if it could provide a reasonable alternative for drawing in places that Flash is not available — for example the iPhone. The animation is kind of a “show-off” feature at this point, honestly I wasn’t expecting any performance with it until I did some early tests with Chrome. Needless to say I was pretty pleased with their V8 engine and look forward to Firefox’s TraceMonkey engine. It’s definitely an exciting time for Javascript developers and the open web!

Speaking of Javascript, I’m very interested in the new Ecmascript 5 features coming this year and kind of have a “watch and wait” attitude right now. Since Javascript and the browsers are in a transition period I’m hesitant to try for too much backward compatibility since those older browsers wouldn’t be able to run it in the first place. ExCanvas does a pretty good job for basic rendering but IE8 is just too sluggish for animation, hopefully that will improve soon.

As for future work, I’m rethinking how canvas elements should be handled since it seems the best way to do layers would be to create multiple canvas elements and stack them up in the same div. I also need to add a bounding-box to each object which would helpful to determine overlap and mouse clicks.
Thanks for checking the project out!

It going slow on a fast computer and the demos reminds of the early computer age. In Flash you see games, 3D engines, advanced photo applications etc and it works for majority of users. So hope the development going little bit faster…