Learn Browserify, Greensock and Redwoodjs

Animations attract the eye and add a higher level of engagement for your users. But they’re not easy to set up, and they don’t always look the way they should on every browser. 

Greensock is the best platform available for creating performant, highly-customizable animations. This course will walk you through the features of Greensock, including how to:

- animate an element
- manually control an animation
- animate between CSS classes

…and more, with cross-browser support to ensure your animations look sharp everywhere.

Ultra high-performance, professional-grade HTML5 animation for the modern web

greensock

Create Amazing Animations with GreenSock

RedwoodJS takes the JAMstack philosophy to the next level. It brings together all the tools modern web development has to offer:

- React
- GraphQL
- Prisma

RedwoodJS abstracts database management away from you so that you can just build your schema and it will do all the plumbing. This collection will go over how to create a RedwoodJS project and the scripts that will help make your developer experience a joy.


Bringing full-stack to the JAMstack

Do you love the JAMstack philosophy but need a database-backed web app? Want great developer experience and easy scaling? Redwood is here! Built on React, GraphQL, and Prisma, Redwood works with the components and development workflow you love, but with simple conventions and helpers to make your experience even better.

redwoodjs

Introduction to RedwoodJS: full-stack framework for JAMstack

GreenSock supports all of the CSS3 3d properties, so you can freely rotate around X, Y, and Z axises with rotationX, rotationY, and rotationZ. Once that's set up, you can tweak the perspective of the element with transformPerspective.

Spin Elements in 3d with GreenSock

By default, elements use their own perspective, so if you rotate multiple elements on the page the perspective will seem a bit off for each of them. The solution is to set the perspective on the container element, then each child element will follow the parents' perspective.

Control the Shared 3d Perspective of Multiple Elements with GreenSock

Sometimes you want to leave an animation looping without any user interaction. This is done using the "repeat" and "yoyo" properties combined to keep the tween moving back and forth from the start properties to the end properties.

Loop a Tween Forever Using Yoyo and Repeat with GreenSock

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

We use `yarn redwood generate page` (`yarn rw` for short) in this lesson to generate an `IndexPage` component. 

The first argument to `yarn rw generate page` is the name of the page you are generating. The second argument is the path you want the page to show up on. So `yarn rw generate page index /` will generate an `IndexPage` component and insert a route entry in our `web/src/Routes.js` file.

We learn that redwood import `React` for you so you don't have to import it manually when you are creating a component.

Generate a Page Using the Redwood CLI

In this lesson, we are going over how to generate a `RedwoodJS` project.

We can create a `RedwoodJS` project with `yarn create redwood-app ./my-redwood-project`.

`yarn` will generate the `RedwoodJS` app in the file folder you specified without installing any globals.

To run the `RedwoodJS` app, we use `yarn redwood dev`. This runs the Redwood client as well as the `GraphQL` backend.

Generate a Redwood Project

RedwoodJS provides a `Link` component that we can use to navigate around our app. We can provide a `to` prop with the path that we want to navigate to.

RedwoodJS takes this a step further and provides a `routes` object from `@redwoodjs/router`. This object is aware of all the routes defined in `web/Routes.js`. This allows us to use the methods on this object rather than referencing the our routes with a string literal. We can then change the route path without having to change all of the references to that route all over our app.

Use RedwoodJS Link and routes Object to Navigate

RedwoodJS gives us a cli command to generate layouts.

`yarn redwood generate layout main`

This will generate a `MainLayout` component in `src/layouts/MainLayout/`. We can use this layout component to define any headers or footers we want to share across multiple pages. 

Extract a RedwoodJS Layout Component

The `gsap.set()` tween (or animation container) is a zero-duration tween that instantly applies a property to an HTML element. In addition, there is a subtle but important difference between `opacity` and Greensock's `autoAlpha` properties. You will learn how to hide a menu on page load and also how to prevent the element from flashing on page load. This lesson contains Greensock's basic building blocks that are used to create advanced animations with UI elements.

To add the latest Greensock library to your project, go to [Greensock's website](https://greensock.com/). Fun fact: GSAP stands for Greensock Animation Platform, and their current latest version is GSAP 3!

A common programming convention for Greensock I like to follow is, if you're going to animate a property with Greensock, keep it in Greensock, otherwise, if you are not going to animate a property, keep it in your CSS.

Hide a Menu with GSAP3's set() Tween and autoAlpha Property

Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

browserify

Building upon the `watch` task that we begin this lesson with, we’ll look at how to create a local development server using the `app` directory as the web root. By using Browsersync to achieve this, we can also instruct all connected browsers to automatically reload each time our bundle is re-generated. Browsersync has a public `.stream()` method that is designed exactly for this purpose.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Live Reload with Browsersync

Gulp is a toolkit for automating painful or time-consuming tasks in your development workflow, so you can stop messing around and build something.

gulp

What is already a nice workflow using Gulp, Browserify, Watchify & Browsersync to enable auto rebuilds & live browser reloading can be further improved by adding Babelify. A simple wrapper around the popular transpiler Babel, Babelify can ‘transform’ source files as they pass through our stream to enable certain Javascript features not yet available in the Browser or Node. We end the lesson by looking at how to generate & extract sourcemaps using `exorcist`.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Babel & Source Maps

Let's look at the basics of setting up Gulp and Browserify. Creating a Gulp task from scratch, we'll cover how to utilise the Browserify API to generate a single `bundle.js` file, catch and log any errors that occur in the compilation process, transform the stream into a format that can be consumed by `gulp.dest` and finish by writing the bundle to a `dist` directory.

Gulp and Browserify - Initial Setup

In this lesson, we will look at Greensock's Draggable API. We will implement a scrollable `<div>` container and explore some options available.

Create scrollable DOM elements with Greensock

Beginning with a single Gulp task capable of generating a one-time Browserify bundle, we enable file-watching and incremental rebuilds by incorporating Watchify. We add a second task `watch` & refactor our initial code to enable the bulk of it to be re-used. We’ll look at exactly how to ‘wire’ these tools together and how the relationship between Watchify & Browserify can manifest into a seriously efficient workflow.

Gulp and Browserify - Hooking up Watchify

Modern development requires modern tooling. Rather than adding GreenSock as a script to an HTML page, we're going to install GreenSock using Yarn and set up our development environment using Parcel. This will allow us to quickly iterate and test out our animation ideas. GreenSock is abbreviated as `gsap` when importing.

Setup GreenSock as a Module with Parcel

Animating an element to a click event is as simple as passing the x and y coordinates of the click event to the properties of the `TweenMax.to` call. To be able to center the element where the mouse clicks, you also need to adjust the special xPercent and yPercent properties so the element is properly offset.

Animate and Center an Element to a Click Event with GreenSock

Rotating an element with GreenSock is as simple as changing the `rotation` property using `TweenMax`. But there's also a hugely convenient trick using the `+=` or `-+` syntax as a string that allows you to adjust based on the previous value of the rotation.

Rotate an Element Based on Previous Values with GreenSock

Animations often have multiple steps. GreenSock makes this simple with the concept of a timeline where you code each point you want your element to move to. This lesson will show you how to set up a timeline as well as pause and resume the timeline animation.

Create Animation Steps with GreenSock's Timeline

You often need to pause or resume an animation based on whether or not the current animation running. The `isActive()` getter returns a boolean that provides you with that information (the opposite information can be found with using the `paused()` getter).

Pause or Resume an Animation by Checking isActive with GreenSock

GreenSock also supports the ability to animate `from` a variable point to the current point. If you think `to` starts at a static point and moves to a variable point then `from` essentially does the opposite. `fromTo` supports the scenario where both points are variables and requires passing in a "from" set of properties and a "to" set of properties.

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