qooxdoo 0.8 - the next major release that includes an exciting rewrite of the GUI toolkit - will also offer a powerful animation layer with a wide range of effects. qooxdoo animation, as we call it, is to a large extent derived from the well-known effect library script.aculo.us.

To give you a small example, I will demonstrate how easy it is to build a typical One Second Spotlight in qooxdoo:
Imagine your website has an info box with the current number of your product's downloads:

Downloads today: <span id="dlAmount">10</span>.

Every time a user starts a download, a function should be called to update the box. Using the Highlight effect on the element containing the number of downloads, you can easily get the user's attention:

 
  var element = document.getElementById("dlAmount");
  var attention = new qx.fx.effect.core.Highlight(element);
 
  function update(amount)
  {
    element.innerHTML = parseInt(amount);
    attention.start();
  }

See the development version of the demobrowser for some early animation demos. Please note that the animation API might still change before the final 0.8 release. The current animation layer is a low-level DOM layer that will later also be used internally to animate the high-level qooxdoo widgets when they are available in 0.8.