EaselJS

EaselJS is a library for building high-performance interactive 2D content in HTML5. It provides a feature-rich display list to allow you to manipulate and animate graphics. It also provides a robust interactive model for mouse and touch interactions.

It is excellent for building games, generative art, ads, data visualization, and other highly graphical experiences. It works well alone, or with the rest of the CreateJS suite: SoundJS, PreloadJS, and TweenJS.

It has no external dependencies, and should be compatible with virtually any framework you enjoy using.

Simple Example

//Draw a square on screen.
var stage = new createjs.Stage('myCanvas');
var shape = new createjs.Shape();
shape.graphics.beginFill('red').drawRect(0, 0, 120, 120);
stage.addChild(shape);
stage.update();

Sprite Animation Example

var ss = new createjs.SpriteSheet({
	frames: {
		width: 32,
		height: 64,
		numFrames: 19
	},
	animations: {run: [0, 25], jump: [26, 63, "run"]},
	images: ["./assets/runningGrant.png"]
});
	
var sprite = new createjs.Sprite(ss, "run");
sprite.scaleY = sprite.scaleX = 0.4;
stage.addChild(sprite);
	
sprite.on("click", function() { sprite.gotoAndPlay("jump"); });
	
createjs.Ticker.on("tick", stage);

Support and Resources

• Find examples and more information at the EaselJS web site.
• Read the documentation.
• Discuss, share projects, and interact with other users on reddit.
• Ask technical questions on Stack Overflow.
• File verified bugs or formal feature requests using Issues on GitHub.
• There is a Google Group for discussions and support.
• Have a look at the included examples and API documentation for more in-depth information.

It was built by gskinner.com, and is released for free under the MIT license, which means you can use it for almost any purpose (including commercial projects). We appreciate credit where possible, but it is not a requirement.

Classes

The API is inspired in part by Flash's display list, and should be easy to pick up for both JS and AS3 developers. Check out the docs for more information.

DisplayObject Abstract base class for all display elements in EaselJS. Exposes all of the display properties (ex. x, y, rotation, scaleX, scaleY, skewX, skewY, alpha, shadow, etc) that are common to all display objects.

Stage The root level display container for display elements. Each time tick() is called on Stage, it will update and render the display list to its associated canvas.

Container A nestable display container, which lets you aggregate display objects and manipulate them as a group.

Bitmap Draws an image, video or canvas to the canvas according to its display properties.

Sprite Displays single frames or animations from sprite sheets, and provides APIs for managing playback and sequencing.

Shape Renders a Graphics object within the context of the display list.

Graphics Provides an easy to use API for drawing vector data. Can be used with Shape, or completely stand alone.

Text Renders a single line of text to the stage.

BitmapText Renders text using a SpriteSheet of letter.

DOMElement An experimental display object that allows you to manage an HTML element as a part of the display list.

Filter The base filter class that other filters (ex. BlurFilter, ColorMatrixFilter, etc) extend.

There are also a few helper classes included:

Shadow Defines all of the properties needed to display a shadow on a display object.

Ticker Provides a pausable centralized tick manager for ticking Stage instances or other time based code.

UID Very simple class that provides global, incremental unique numeric IDs.

SpriteSheet Encapsulates all the data associated with a sprite sheet to be used with Sprite.

SpriteSheetUtils Contains utility methods for extending existing sprite sheets with flipped frames and extracting individual frames.

SpriteSheetBuilder Build a bitmap SpriteSheet from vector graphics at run time. Get the filesize savings of vector, with the performance of a SpriteSheet.

Matrix2D Represents a 3x3 affine transformation matrix. Used internally for calculating concatenated transformations.

Rectangle Represents a rectangle as defined by the points (x, y) and (x+width, y+height).

Point Represents a point on a 2 dimensional x / y coordinate system.

A WebGL implementation currently exists, but is limited.

SpriteContainer A container that accepts a SpriteSheet, and uses a WebGL stage (SpriteStage) for WebGL-accelerated content.

SpriteStage A Stage class that uses a WebGL context. Currently, can only have children that are SpriteContainers.

A new WebGL implementation is in the works, which removes these limitations.