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 a Cakefile


We've gotten a little ahead of ourselves. We upgraded our application to use data from a database, but right now our database doesn't exist! While we might build some sort of import system or data entry interface to add records to our application in production, during development it's nice to be able to easily add a set of seed data. We already have this seed data, we just need a way to put it into our database.

CoffeeScript provides a simple but effective solution to these sorts of problems: Cakefiles. Cakefiles are inspired by the venerable Makefiles, the build system for C and friends. The premise of a Makefile and its variants (Ruby users will also be familiar with Rakefiles) is simple: it consists of various tasks which can be invoked individually from the command line. Each task definition contains instructions that will be run when the task is run. In a Cakefile, the task definitions and bodies are all written in CoffeeScript.

Think of a Cakefile as a very simple command...