Learn Greensock, Karma and Serverless

Starting from a prebuilt frontend, Jason Lengstorf guides you through the creation of a "Corgi Up-boop App" that uses Netlify Functions and Hasura. You can view [the deployed final product on Netlify](https://egghead-serverless-functions.netlify.app/).

You'll set up the Netlify CLI, and configure a local development environment before writing and deploying functions with a few different use cases.

The first example function bypasses CORS restrictions to retrieve corgi data from an example third-party API.

Next, you'll configure environmental variables to securely communicate with the Unsplash API without exposing private keys to the client.

Serverless functions don't persist data by themselves, so we will use  Hasura to create a GraphQL API for tracking the number of "boops" each corgi receives.

This course is an excellent illustration of the speed of Serverless functions, and how fast you can implement functionality in your web applications.

An all-in-one workflow that combines global deployment, continuous integration, and automatic HTTPS.

netlify

Build a Corgi Up-boop Web App with Netlify Serverless Functions and Hasura

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

Create a serverless application and deploy it in under thirty minutes!

We'll be using Netlify, Vite, TypeScript, and React in our project. This stack synergizes extremely well for rapidly developing professional-quality applications. 

If you haven't heard of Vite, it's the French word for quick! It's also a build tool that consists of a dev-server and an extremely fast bundler. It makes for a rapid development loop.

As for the rest. Netlify makes hosting fast and easy with serverless functions and continuous deployment. React enables you to quickly create reusable components. And TypeScript helps you write cleaner code that is easier to refactor. 

So get started and learn how to use this stack in your own applications!

Deploy a Serverless API React Application with TypeScript

Karma is essentially a tool which spawns a web server that executes source code against test code for each of the browsers connected.

karma

A quick tutorial covering installing Karma and running tests from the command line and Webstorm.

Introduction to Karma

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

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.

Animate From a Variable Point with from and fromTo in GreenSock

Each animation can be moved to a specific point in time based on the `progress` setting between 0 and 1 (0% and 100%). This lesson shows how to control the progress using the scroll wheel of the mouse which can easily fast-forward or rewind through the timeline.

Manually Control the Animation with progress in GreenSock

Any GreenSock animation can accept an array of dom elements. This lesson shows you how to easily create and tween 100 divs to the same point.

Control an Array of Elements with the Same Animation in GreenSock

There are many reasons you'd want to stop an animation from running. `TweenMax` provides ways to stop a tween of a specific element or every tween currently running, we are going to look at two of them, `killTweensOf` and `killAll`. This lesson walks you through stopping a tween by clicking on a specific element or stopping every tween and forcing them all to complete.

Stop Animations with killTweensOf and killAll in GreenSock

GreenSock enables you to animate between classes defined in your stylesheets using the `className` syntax in your tween properties. This lesson walks you through using the `mouseover`/`mouseout` and `mousedown`/`mouseup` events to add and remove css classes based on the specific event.

Animate Between CSS Classes with GreenSock

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

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

A serverless function is something that is going to allow us to do server-like things without having to manage servers, but an important distinction here is that serverless does not mean that there are **no** servers. 

The environment is actually running on top of an operating system and uses physical servers, but the responsibility for provisioning and managing the infrastructure belongs entirely to the service provider.

Some of the benefits of using serverless functions: 

- **Enhanced scalability.** No need for developers to implement code to scale. It scales automatically.
- **Reduced time to market.** Serverless is an optimized set of tools for building quickly.
- **No boiler code.** A serverless function is just a tiny piece of logic. Reducing the complexity of software.
- **More time for user experience.** Serverless functions allow teams to focus resources on the user experience and not on managing servers.
- **Security.** We can call third-party APIs securely without exposing important data on the client-side.

What Are Serverless Functions?

Netlify makes developing serverless functions easy with the netlify-cli (`ntl` for short). You'll be able to build and test functions locally as well as publish your functions from the CLI. 

We will install netlify-cli globally and create a `netlify.toml` file that will configure where the CLI should look to run functions that we define, in our case `functions/`. When the application is served up, Netlify runs functions under `/.netlify/functions/`.

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