What is the current state of the art in HTML canva

Question

I am currently investigating options for working with the canvas in a new HTML 5 application, and was wondering what is the current state of the art in HTML canvas JavaScript libraries and frameworks?

In particular, are there frameworks that support the kind of things needed for game development - complex animation, managing scene graphs, handling events and user interactions?

Also willing to consider both commercial and open source products.

Answer 1

Raphael seems a pretty good canvas library; it's SVG-based (or VML-based in Internet Explorer), and thus supports a lot of user input events. It's fairly small (60kb gzipped), so isn't too large a dependency.
It seems to have a nice tweener too: http://raphaeljs.com/reference.html#animate (see here and here for examples).

For an example of what it can do, have a look at this clever little demo.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

I just released the first iteration of a new drawing & tweening library geared towards folks with an AS3/Flash development background. While my lib doesn't yet support complex drawing paths or graphs per say I'm hoping it'll help folks quickly draw & animate basic primitives in a familiar way.

Feedback and comments are welcome. http://www.quietless.com/kitchen/introducing-js3/

Answer 3

CAKE.js is no longer being maintained but is a fairly powerful framework - http://code.google.com/p/cakejs/

Demos here - http://glimr.rubyforge.org/cake/canvas.html, http://glimr.rubyforge.org/cake/missile_fleet.html