In my nearly 20 years of developing custom software solutions, nothing has had as great an impact on our industry or society as the Internet. Today, it would be difficult to imagine a world without HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. When I developed my first web-based application using JavaScript with Netscape Navigator in the mid 1990s, little did I know that we were in the early days of a software revolution.
Skip ahead nearly two decades and JavaScript has become one of the most widely supported programming languages in the world. Unfortunately, little has changed with JavaScript in this time and it is plagued with gotchas that can make developing a pure JavaScript system challenging. Enter CoffeeScript.
CoffeeScript provides us with a better approach to develop our applications that not only helps us to avoid these pitfalls, but also allows us to be more productive while still being able to take advantage of the large JavaScript ecosystem.
This book is a practical guide, filled with many step-by-step examples of using CoffeeScript for all aspects of building our software.
We will begin by looking at the fundamentals and getting our tools ready to be productive CoffeeScript developers. Next, we will use CoffeeScript to create our application layers, including the user interface, database, and backend services layer. After that, we will investigate various options to test and host our applications. Finally, we will look at ways CoffeeScript can be used by the DevOps to help automate their day-to-day tasks.
Chapter 1, Getting Ready, introduces CoffeeScript and lays the foundation to use CoffeeScript to develop all aspects of modern cloud-based applications.
Chapter 2, Starting with the Basics, covers using CoffeeScript with strings, numbers, dates, arrays, and classes.
Chapter 3, Creating Client Applications, demonstrates using CoffeeScript with various UI libraries and frameworks, including jQuery, Backbone, Angular, and Socket.IO.
Chapter 4, Using Kendo UI for Desktop and Mobile Applications, demonstrates how to use CoffeeScript with Telerik's open source Kendo UI Core framework to create both desktop and mobile applications.
Chapter 5, Going Native with Cordova, demonstrates how to use Apache Cordova with CoffeeScript to create native applications that can access native device features such as camera, geolocation, and contacts and be deployed to physical hardware.
Chapter 6, Working with Databases, covers various database technologies, including SQLite, Redis, MongoDB, and CouchDB, and how CoffeeScript can be used with each technology to perform create, read, update, and delete operations.
Chapter 7, Building Application Services, dives into the aspects of building the backend services needed by our application with a look at building RESTful services, working with Base64 encoding, and using domain name services to do DNS and reverse DNS lookups.
Chapter 8, Using External Services, examines ways to use existing services to send text messages and e-mails, use the Amazon cloud storage, and transfer files via FTP.
Chapter 9, Testing Our Applications, is dedicated to using CoffeeScript to test our applications using test frameworks such as Jasmine, Mocha, and Zombie as well as creating mocks using Persona.
Chapter 10, Hosting Our Web Applications, explains how to prepare your application for deployment using Grunt, and how to deploy to popular cloud hosting solutions such as Heroku and Windows Azure.
Chapter 11, Scripting for DevOps, examines ways that CoffeeScript can be used to help with day-to-day operation tasks such as working with files and directories, CSV and fixed-width data files, generating PDF files, and formatting data for output.
To use the code in this book, you will need a code editor of your choice, a web browser, and an Internet connection to download Node packages and other libraries or frameworks.
If you enjoy developing applications that can be run on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices without needing to learn platform-specific languages, this is the book for you.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "In this example we will demonstrate the use of spawn() to execute a CoffeeScript statement."
A block of code is set as follows:
var multiply = function(a, b) {
return a * b;
};When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
if value % 2 is 0 then console.log 'Value is even'
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
coffee -c -m counting.coffee
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Tools menu and select the Extensions and Updates menu option."
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