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Fireworks.js

A javascript animation experiment

Fireworks.js is a bit of Javascript that creates starburst-type explosions in a web document; in short, it’s a fireworks effect someone could theoretically use on their site. And come on, who doesn’t want something like that? As far as appropriateness is concerned, this effect could be compared to the dripping-blood-line, skull and fireball animated .GIF images so popular on the web in 1997. Exploding firework animations are hot, the new black, the script equivalent of the blink tag. Mmm, blink tag.

Nonetheless, Fireworks has been published here for fun, experimenting a bit with simple trigonometry and math, and those who are perhaps interested in javascript animation, object-oriented code or script-driven sound. It also serves as a dirty browser performance test of sorts, as a large number of elements are dynamically created, moved and destroyed on this page as the script runs.

Fireworks does the following nifty things:

• Random explosion patterns and colours
• Customizable API allows for additional firework types and effects
• Optional script-driven sound effects provided by SoundManager API
• Nifty queue-based animation (easily set up your own firework sequences)
• Sound panning effect based on firework location (left/right) on screen
• Single-image, tile-based animation for efficiency
• Standard DOM calls work under XML doctypes (ie. application/xhtml+xml)
• Extensible (ideally), object-oriented, memory-leak-tested code*

* (I tried, but no guarantees. May drip a bit.)

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