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

Defining a class in CoffeeScript


A class, in essence, is not much more than a name and a collection of properties that define its behavior. A class is defined once, but can be instantiated many times.

Here's the simplest class definition in CoffeeScript:

class Airplane

That's it! We now have an Airplane class, and we can create instances of it.

plane = new Airplane()
plane.color = "white"

The new keyword instantiates the object just like in JavaScript. The parentheses are optional, but I prefer to leave them in, to keep it consistent with other function invocations with no arguments. We can set arbitrary properties on our plane, just as we can do with any object in JavaScript.

Attaching methods to a class

So far we haven't done much we couldn't accomplish just as well with a generic object. Let's attach a method to our class' prototype.

Note

A method is just a function that's attached to an object.

class Airplane
  takeOff: ->
    console.log "Vrrrroooom!"

Now we're making progress! CoffeeScript...