From a JavaFX point of view, an animation is a change of a property over a period of time; for example:

• If you want an object to move, you need to work with coordinate properties.
• If you want to shrink or enlarge an object, you can use the scale property.
• You can even use the Animation API for objects which don't have a visual representation at all.

You need the following three API classes to create an animation:

• KeyFrame represents a point in time
• KeyValue describes the value the desired property should have at the moment described by KeyFrame
• Timeline collects all KeyFrame objects and runs the animation, calculating all intermediate values for properties between KeyFrame objects.

In the next section, we will review these concepts with an example.