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

Managing display logic with classes


Looking at setup.coffee, we can see that a lot of the remaining code deals with formatting HTML output. A lot of it is specific to displaying animal descriptions, so let's start with that. We could move these functions to the Pet class, but it's considered a best practice to separate the business logic of your application from the display logic. Mixing data operations with display output tends to create tightly coupled code, making it very difficult to make changes to either the backend or the frontend later on.

Instead, we'll separate this logic into view classes. These will concern themselves with displaying the page and responding to user input, but will leave any manipulation of the data to the other classes. We'll start with the view for a single pet. Let's create a new class in pet_view.coffee.

class window.PetView
  constructor: (@pet) ->

This class' constructor takes a single argument, a Pet object. It will obtain values from this object when building...