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 Brunch


If your application is completely client-side, you don't need a server framework like Rails or Node to execute backend logic, but you still need a way to build your assets. If CoffeeScript is the only preprocessing you need to do on your application, the simplest way to do this is using the command-line tool. However, you might want a more formal framework for organizing your project, or you might have other build steps involved in preparing your client-side project.

Brunch is a very popular choice for these situations. Brunch describes itself as an "assembler for HTML5 applications". It can compile a number of popular formats into their web-ready counterparts, like Haml into HTML, Sass into CSS, and of course CoffeeScript into JavaScript. Brunch also packages, concatenates, and minifies these files so you can write code without worrying about the build step. We'll port our pet shop application to Brunch to try out the CoffeeScript compilation and other features...