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

Running a server with CoffeeScript


In Chapter 10, Using CoffeeScript in More Places, one of the systems we looked at was a Node server using Express. At that time, we left the server code in JavaScript and focused on using connect-assets to compile our client-side CoffeeScript into JavaScript. Now, we're going to use that Express application again, but we'll be working on the server-side code. And you guessed it—we'll be writing CoffeeScript.

Tip

Our package.json already includes coffee-script as a dependency, since we're using it for asset compilation. If it didn't, though, we would need to add coffee-script to the devDependencies to make sure our development tools have access to the CoffeeScript compiler.

We'll start with the Express server JavaScript code from Chapter 10, Using CoffeeScript in More Places. We could convert it to CoffeeScript manually, but there's a neat utility that we can use to convert JavaScript to CoffeeScript automatically. It's named, appropriately, js2coffee, and...