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 CoffeeScript with other class libraries


CoffeeScript classes are a great way to organize your code, and work just fine on their own. Sometimes, though, you'll be using a JavaScript framework that provides (among other things) its own class structures. It's usually possible to build these classes in CoffeeScript, but the exact mechanism will vary depending on the framework.

We'll look at two popular frameworks here. If you have another framework you wish to use, it's likely that it will fall into one of these two categories. In the first, we use the full CoffeeScript class system, and integrate it with the framework through standard JavaScript functionality. In the second, we use the framework's system to define classes, but still make use of syntactic CoffeeScript sugar when we're filling in the classes' behavior.

Backbone classes in CoffeeScript

Backbone.js is a popular JavaScript framework that offers models, collections, views, and a router. It has a lot in common philosophically...