Recently I released Raphaël 1.0 RC1. The most noticeable change for users of the library is differences in the API: removing moveTo, lineTo and friends from the path object. Why did I decide to do this? The biggest drawback of these methods is that they apply immediately. That means that if you draw path consisting of three segments, path element is updated three times – each time with increased number of segments, so total number of segments drawn is 1 + 2 + 3 = 6. The more segments your path has, the longer it takes to draw. In geometric progression.
To avoid this I could introduce some method “draw” that could be called after you define all segments, but this doesn’t look like an elegant solution and doesn’t suit the library’s name. There is a soluton that is compact, simple and you could easily work with it. Say, you want to change some point on the path. There is no interface for this apart from SVG path, and I can’t think of any elegant and easy to grasp API for this. Manipulating strings is what JavaScript can do very well. So I removed these methods from the library to external plugin, which you could concatenate with the Raphaël if you really rely on them. I suggest you learn SVG path syntax: it is simpler than it looks.
Other big thing is adding support for angle in arc. This is very rare thing, and frankly, I haven’t seen it in the wild, but without it SVG path support wasn’t complete. To make it happen I rewrote arcTo for VML completely. Now it converts arc to bezier curve, because VML doesn’t have support for angles in arc segments. The same method is now used in animation (for SVG & VML), which makes animation more smooth. Conversion of the whole path into bezier curves let me do path bounding box calculations more precisely, especially in VML. In fact, Safari doesn’t calculate bounding box for path correctly either.
I also worked on improving performance by applying caching and simply optimizing code.
