Coffeescript Presentation

I recently presented to the team an introduction to CoffeeScript (CS). CS is a Ruby-like language which compiles into Javascript.

You can find the presentation here (you may need to refresh the page a few times as google docs seems dodgy). Obviously not as good as the real thing but you'll get the idea.

The code examples I used during the presentation can be found here, if you have a browse through these you should have a good idea of the language features.:

https://github.com/quii/CoffeeScript-snippets

If you are involved in any kind of web development, I encourage you to give CoffeeScript a go. It doesn't take a great deal to set it up and once you have Cake (build system like Make, Rake et al.) automatically compiling your code, it becomes just like normal Javascript development.

I have made a basic skeleton project to get you going, with a Cake file which will automagically compile your CS into JS as you make changes.

https://github.com/quii/Coffeescript-web-application-example

Simply clone that and then run

cake watch

My experience with Coffeescript has been generally very positive. For Springer's innovation week I have built a pretty cool web application entirely with Coffeescript, using Node.js for the server with a MongoDb for persistence. I will blog about that soon but suffice to say being able to do the whole project in one language felt great.