Book Image

CoffeeScript Application Development

By : Ian Greenleaf Young
Book Image

CoffeeScript Application Development

By: Ian Greenleaf Young

Overview of this book

JavaScript is becoming one of the key languages in web development. It is now more important than ever across a growing list of platforms. CoffeeScript puts the fun back into JavaScript programming with elegant syntax and powerful features. CoffeeScript Application Development will give you an in-depth look at the CoffeeScript language, all while building a working web application. Along the way, you'll see all the great features CoffeeScript has to offer, and learn how to use them to deal with real problems like sprawling codebases, incomplete data, and asynchronous web requests. Through the course of this book you will learn the CoffeeScript syntax and see it demonstrated with simple examples. As you go, you'll put your new skills into practice by building a web application, piece by piece. You'll start with standard language features such as loops, functions, and string manipulation. Then, we'll delve into advanced features like classes and inheritance. Learn advanced idioms to deal with common occurrences like external web requests, and hone your technique for development tasks like debugging and refactoring. CoffeeScript Application Development will teach you not only how to write CoffeeScript, but also how to build solid applications that run smoothly and are a pleasure to maintain.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
CoffeeScript Application Development
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using CoffeeScript with Rails


Ruby on Rails is a popular server-side framework for web applications. Rails has recently adopted first-class support for CoffeeScript, making it the preferred choice for client-side code in Rails applications. Rails uses an asset pipeline to compile CoffeeScript (among other things). This is some code that takes assets such as scripts and style sheets, and compiles and prepares them for consumption by a browser. We'll walk through the steps to get your CoffeeScript running smoothly in Rails with the asset pipeline, and we'll port our pet shop application to Rails to try it out.

Setting up the asset pipeline

The steps we'll need to follow depend on which version of Rails we are working with, and whether it is a new Rails application or an existing one. Please pick the appropriate section from the following for your Rails needs.

Creating a new Rails application

If you don't have an existing Rails application to work with, you should create a new one. This is very...