10 Javascript frameworks that help you work with canvas

November 27, 2011

The HTML5 canvas element is becoming even more popular and, while reading some tutorials about it, I realized that there are many javascript frameworks that make it much easier to work with canvas.

So here goes the list. Feel free to suggest others that you've seen around.

Paper.js

Paper.js is an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and bezier curves, all neatly wrapped up in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface.

Website - Demos

Processing.js

Processing.js is the sister project of the popular Processing visual programming language, designed for the web. Processing.js makes your data visualizations, digital art, interactive animations, educational graphs, video games, etc. work using web standards and without any plug-ins.

Website - Demos

jCanvaScript

jCanvaScript is a javasript library that provides you methods to manage with the content of a HTML5 canvas element easily. It runs on any platform (including iPhone, iPad, Android) that supports canvas and JavaScript.

Website

Fabric.js

Fabric.js is a framework that makes it easy to work with HTML5 canvas element. It is an interactive object model on top of canvas element. It is also an SVG-to-canvas parser.

Website - Demos

LibCanvas

LibCanvas is a free javascript library, based on AtomJS framework. This library gives the developer a lot of tools for creating web applications & games by expanding canvas-2d context existing methods and providing new ones.

Website - Demos

CanvasXpress

CanvasXpress is a javascript library based on the canvas tag implemented in HTML5. It supports bar graphs, line graphs, bar-line combination graphs, boxplots, dotplots, area graphs, stacked graphs, stacked-line combination graphs, percentage-stacked graphs, percentage-stacked-line combination graphs, correlation plots, Venn diagrams, heatmaps, newick trees, 2D-scatter plots, 2D-scatter bubble plots, 3D-scatter plots, pie charts, networks (or pathways), and a genome browser.

Website - Demos

guru

gury (pronounced "jury") is a JavaScript library designed to aid in the creation of HTML5/Canvas applications by providing an easy-to-use chain based interface. With gury you can create a canvas tag, resize and style it, add renderable objects, animate those objects, and place it anywhere on the page in a single chained expression.

Website

CAKE

CAKE is a JavaScript scene graph library for the HTML5 canvas tag. You could think of it as SVG sans the XML and not be too far off.

Website - Demos

bHive

Create rich user experinces, animations, games and applications with bHive, a HTML 5 canvas framework API built to make developing easier, so you can start creating straight away.

Website - Demos

xc.js

xc.js is a framework for HTML Canvas games in Javascript. It's simple and fun to use and you can even try it out right here in your browser. But that's not all. xc.js also runs on other platforms. You can write your games in Javascript and run them in all sorts of cool places (like on your phone!).

Website

Comments

boyaci • December 17, 2011 13:07

Very good health into the hands of a share.

dekorasyon • April 9, 2012 13:58

Thank you for useful article.

sitedesignnet • May 25, 2012 21:36

Thanks for the information and success.

Adrian • June 10, 2012 17:13

guryjs.org is down

Too bad most of them are not object oriented and dont have documentation :(

You missed kineticJS framework

Aleksandar • August 6, 2012 22:01

I have just started using JavaScript frameworks for Canvas and I need help. I hava an assignment to find the best framework(s) for these tasks:
- good drawing perfomance(ecpecialy in drawin huge amount of data given in JSON and SVG),
- works with JSON,
- works with SVG and
- can be useful to draw interactive objects(object that can be moved, resized...)

electronic components companies • October 17, 2012 16:24

Too bad most of them are not object oriented and dont have documentation :(

You missed kineticJS framework

Gwennael Buchet • November 28, 2012 23:19

Hi,

there is also cgSceneGraph (http://gwennaelbuchet.github.com/cgSceneGraph/) :
- object oriented
- very well documented
- object manipulation (multi-select, resiez, drag, fast collision detection, ...)
- full animation engine
- animated sprites
- spritesheets
- ...

look in here • December 5, 2012 23:12

I just wanted to thank you so much for sahring this great article.

get insidwe • December 5, 2012 23:16

This is great information, but the think is that all the apps have not the object oriented and also lacks of the right documentation. Good work by the way.

JavaScript Canvas Libraries • December 29, 2012 17:58

Very nice collection of Javascript Libraries. I was looking for some before compiling a collection. Really in love with Paper.js

Ted • January 3, 2013 18:12

A new one: GoJS. Looks very powerful. for diagrams (org charts, flowcharts, mindmaps, and so on) http://www.nwoods.com/components/canvas/gojs-overview.htm