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

Chapter 3. Building a Simple Application

We've set up our CoffeeScript work environment, and we've also learned a whole bunch of new syntax for writing good CoffeeScript. Now it's time to put all of that knowledge to work! In this chapter, we'll dive into building our web application. We'll need everything we have learned in the previous chapters, but now, we'll be using it to build a cohesive product. We'll also stop along the way to learn about several more vital features of CoffeeScript that will help us build a better application.

We're going to create a web application for a small pet shop. We'll start out by creating a page to display the pets who are currently staying at the pet shop, so that prospective customers can browse and check if the shop has a pet they like. Our application will be a lightweight web page with most of the logic in JavaScript. Of course, we won't be writing JavaScript; we'll write CoffeeScript and let the compiler take care of the dirty work!

We will:

  • Set up our...