JavaScript is definitely an important part of a website as it allow the developer to interact directly with the web browser. Since 2005, lots of new JavaScript techniques and tools such as Ajax and jQuery became extremely popular and made the web a better place. Today, I’m introducing to you CoffeeScript, a new language that make JavaScript better and simpler.
What is CoffeeScript?
To keep it simple, CoffeeScript is a little language that compiles into JavaScript. If you ever coded in languages such as Python or Ruby, you’ll probably love CoffeeScript a lot. Instead of awkward braces and semicolons, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous object model at its heart.
The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly from CoffeeScript (and vice-versa). The compiled output is readable and pretty-printed, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, will work in every JavaScript implementation, and tends to run as fast or faster than the equivalent handwritten JavaScript.
Installing CoffeeScript
Installing CoffeeScript is not hard at all. The first thing to do is to make sure that you already installed a working copy of the latest stable version of Node.js as well as npm, the Node Package Manager.
Once done, you can install CoffeeScript by running the following command:
npm install -g coffee-script
CoffeeScript is now installed. Next step is to compile a
.coffee file into a .js file. Use the following syntax to do so:
