7 years ago Janusz Vax Radkiewicz, Bartek Terk Raciborski and Michał Mis/io Zajączkowski have created a project named Alladyn. Alladyn was at the time most sophisticated and powerful JavaScript library ever. The name came from DynDuo, very popular library, and the chain was DynDuo->DynTrio->DynAll->Alladyn.
In 2 kb of source code, Alladyn offered more than any other library, cross-browsing, key-frame based animations, public API, and others.
We’ve released 7 official versions and one special, with more open license (Alladyn 1.7lite) that was bundled into Pajączek NxG Pro.
In 2002 the work has begun on Alladyn 2 codename Dynamite. We spent many night sessions at Vax’s flat, mine flat and several Wroclaw’s pubs on this, but around 2003 the idea faded out because of lack of time.
So using the recent buzz around Alladyn licensing, to clear the story we’ve gathered again, discussed the goals and issues and following our believe in openness and freedom we’ve opened Alladyn.
Ladies and gentleman. May I present you Alladyn project on Google Code on tri-license MPL/GPL/LGPL. Feel free to scan the sources, there are several interesting things like Alladyn 0.5, 0.91, and various planned builds of Alladyn 2.0. The most stable of them is currently in trunk/lib/Alladyn.js.
It supports real time animation, multiple animator objects that can have different animation paths which can run with different speeds etc. and support for vGIN’s – Alladyn plugin system.
Alladyn keeps the model of animation based on keyframes, but with several animators you can do real magic, like setting one animator to move layer1 100px left in 10 seconds while another animator runs at the same time and moves the same layer 200px down. With real time synchronization (that is able to count and skip frames), it’s really powerful.
What next? We have to update Alladyn to support XHTML, test if it can work well with SVG. Remove the obsolate NS4,IE5 compatibility code, and play with CSS3 to get as much as possible.
I’m extremely happy about it, also because my plan to include Alladyn into Daniel Glazman‘s Composer++ to do some pretty nice animations 🙂 If you want to help, step in, email us or what, and we’ll get Alladyn 2 into shape.
Alladyn was always driven by the idea of perfect, clean code that is smaller than its documentation. Do you know any other examples of this approach? 🙂
P.S. Terk’s blog post