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

Structuring our data with classes


Let's define a simple class to represent a person. Right now we only have one person represented in the project—the owner—but in the future we may have more people, such as employees. It will be helpful to have a class that encapsulates all the shared logic for dealing with people. We'll start out with a simple class:

class window.Person
  constructor: (@name) ->

Right now our class contains only a constructor. We learned in the previous chapter that putting @name in the constructor arguments automatically assigns it as a property of the new object.

We'll put this class in a new file, named person.coffee. Having each class in a separate file is a good convention to follow. Since classes naturally encapsulate shared pieces of logic, it's a good way to split things up; it keeps our code manageable while still making everything easy to find. Our setup.coffee was already getting a bit long, so moving some of the logic into classes will help shrink that file...