Raphaël is a very slick looking JavaScript library for drawing and animating vector graphics with JavaScript. The API is simple and well thought-out and it supports all major browsers, including Internet Explorer 6. I’m especially impressed by how well it performs–the animations are extremely smooth. And because each graphic object is also a DOM object, you can add interaction using normal JavaScript event handlers.

I’m quite excited by how quickly JavaScript graphics capabilities are advancing. I think over the next year we’re going to see a lot of cool stuff.

Here are a couple demos showing just how smooth the animations look:

• Tween-like animations
• Animated Chart

(via ajaxian)