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

Summary


In this chapter, we learned how to integrate CoffeeScript using:

  • A special version of the CoffeeScript compiler that runs directly in the browser

  • Browser add-ons to support CoffeeScript in the developer console.

  • The Rails asset pipeline

  • Brunch, the web application assembler

  • A Node package that provides an asset pipeline as Connect middleware

This chapter was all about finding the tools to bring convenient, well-organized CoffeeScript support to our favorite web frameworks. Hopefully you've been able to use these on a project or two that was desperately in need of CoffeeScript's eloquent syntax.

There's one more place to use CoffeeScript that we haven't covered yet: the server! Next chapter, we'll learn all about using CoffeeScript in Node.js, and we'll try it out by porting the Express application we wrote in this chapter from JavaScript to CoffeeScript.