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

CoffeeScript in the browser console


Another place you may wish to run CoffeeScript is in the console of your browser's developer tools. In Chapter 1, Running a CoffeeScript Program, we learned how to use the command-line CoffeeScript console to quickly try out new ideas. The browser console offers a similar opportunity, and it also provides access to the DOM. This is invaluable when working on frontend code, because we can interact with our existing page and call our existing functions. Browser consoles are available built in to browsers such as Firefox and Chrome, or available as a plugin such as Firebug.

The browser console is great, but it's an annoying context switch to go back to writing JavaScript in the console, and it prevents us from easily copying code that we want to keep back into our project. Wouldn't it be nicer if we could write CoffeeScript in the console?

A CoffeeScript console in Firefox

With Firefox, we can use Paul Rouget's JSTerm add-on. This tool adds a fully-featured...