Raphael is a popular JavaScript library helping you to manage vectors via SVG or VML in your browser. It is extremely helpful and very easy to learn and use. The interesting thing is that in the browser you can do very powerful things with vectors, but they remain very less known. However with such libraries like Raphael the task is really simple.

Animation

As I said animating some vector properties is as simple as:

var paper = Raphael('canvas', 1024, 500);
var c = paper.circle(50, 50, 6).attr({fill : '#f00'});
c.animate({r : 10, fill : '#00f'}, 1000);

Here we change the radius and the background color of the circle for 1000 milliseconds.

The same thing can be done with any property with any other JavaScript library as jQuery. But as in jQuery, Raphael or whatever library the animation is not looping. That’s natural you can just change a property by animating it, but the looping animation suggests at least two animations. So it’s a developers job to implement this. Here’s a simple way to do this.

Two Way Animation

The solution here is using two functions calling each other.

var paper = Raphael('canvas', 1024, 500);
var c = paper.circle(50, 50, 6).attr({fill : '#f00'});
 
function a() {
    c.animate({r : 10, fill : '#00f'}, 1000, b);
}
function b() {
    c.animate({r : 6, fill : '#f00'}, 1000, a);
}
a();