Janis Javascript Animation Framework 0.1

Janis is a lightweight Javascript framework that provides simple animations via CSS transitions for modern browsers on the web as well as mobile devices. It is not designed to solve everyone's problems--it's simply designed to organize commonly used methods of animating DOM elements in Javascript. It is released under the MIT license and is free to re-use or modify in any way as long as you keep the copyright notice in the file.

Usage

Janus uses a design pattern similar to jQuery--you may call it as a function, passing in the elements you wish to interact with and it will return a Janis object you can perform animations with. For instance:

var myElement = document.getElementById("somediv");
Janis(myElement).animate({
    "left": "300px",
    "duration": 1000
});

Will animate <div id="somediv"> to an x position of 300 over 1000 ms. The first and only argument to the Janis() function can be an HTML Element, an array of HTML Elements, a NodeList/HTMLCollection, or a CSS selector.

Janis also supports chained animations. To run animations back to back in order:

var myAnimation = Janis(".my-div");
myAnimation.chain().animate({
    "width": "100px",
    "height": "100px",
    "duration": 500
}).animate({
    "width": "50px",
    "height": "50px",
    "duration": 500
});

// Execute the animation!
myAnimation.execute();

This will animate any element with a class name of "my-div" to 100x100, followed by animating the matching elements to 50x50. If we wanted to, we could loop this chained animation by running the loop() method. The following syntax tells Janis to loop our animation chain 10 times:

myAnimation.loop(10);

Alternatively, we could set the chain to loop infinitely by passing -1 as the argument, or by simply leaving the argument undefined. We can also stop and start our animation at any time:

myAnimation.pause();
myAnimation.play();

Please note, however, that the pause function does not stop the animation in place. The element will finish its current step before pausing. This is a current limitation in the CSS Transition specification, but I'm working out a clever way to address this.

Configuration and Defaults

This isn't the most elegant solution, but you can currently set default properties thusly:

Janis.config.duration = 1000; // Default 0
Janis.config.delay = 0; // Default 0
Janis.config.easing = "ease-in-out"; // Default 'linear'
Janis.config.browserProperty = 'WebkitTransition'; // Auto-detects by default

Roadmap

• Engineer method of pausing and resuming mid-transition
• Make demos and examples
• Develop better way (read: any way) of handling CSS Transforms
• Enable specifying functions to determine value of properties ({"left": function(el) { return el.offsetLeft / 2; }})
• Enable relative properties ({"left": "+10px"})
• Dream up more features