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

Getting to know our remote API


Now that we know why asynchronous operations are important, let's go find one! We've decided to embellish the pet descriptions we display in our application when a pet is chosen from the list. In addition to information about the specific pet, we'd like to show some information about that breed. This will help our customers gain a better understanding of the animal they are interested in, and maybe teach them something extra!

Since we don't want to manage this extra information ourselves, we'd like to fetch it from another source, one who's in the business of compiling information. We're going to use a search engine, named DuckDuckGo, that's fast, powerful, and friendly to developers. DuckDuckGo provides an API to access their instant answers functionality. This is a feature that gives a concise summary for a search term, culled from various web sources they index.

Note

To learn more about DuckDuckGo's API, visit https://duckduckgo.com/api.

A typical query to this...