JavaScript for Line of Business Applications

Latte is a superset of JavaScript with lots of useful extensions. Get the power of CoffeeScript, but keep the syntax you know and love.

* Let Statement
* Functions
* Arrays
* Monads

A framework for developers who want to design, build and share cross device applications.

I can give you a simple and powerful structure to make the most of your web applications. An application consists of three work contexts: Model, View and Controller, developers usually call it the MVC pattern. These three contexts are equally important and each has its full integrity giving responsibility to your application.

Whenever I write JavaScript I throw all software craftsmanship discipline out the window. There are no unit tests and very little structure to the code. It's just me and the browser refresh button until we get it right. If you are lucky you may have jQuery to provide a nice CSS selector based api that somewhat shields you from browser quirks. Maybe you even kept your project from devolving to the point where every page is basically its own JavaScript app with no hope of reuse between them. Even then JavaScript is still likely a second class language in your project. Surprisingly, this state of affairs is normal. I want to take my client side scripting just as seriously as any other code in my Grails web app. I want tests, structure, and less boilerplate, and I am going to use AngularJS and CoffeeScript to do that.

It is still in very early stage and in terms of features it draws uml sequence diagram from your input and you can share the document with multiple users who can participate in collaborative editing.

Behind the scene TextUml is developed with Backbone.js in CoffeeScript, it uses Require.js for modularization, KineticJS for html5 canvas drawing,  Mocha, Chai and Sinon for client side testing. The server side uses all the latest beta of ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET WebAPI and Signalr. 

ES6 transpilers are actively being developed and are catching up to CoffeeScript in functionality. This post only covered a handful of the features that ES6 is bringing to JavaScript but you can find out more about what’s been covered and the other features here.

On your next project set CoffeeScript aside and give ES6 a shot!

How is JavaScript a minefield? Well, JavaScript has all sorts of pitfalls lurking for the developer. Each pitfall is like a mine in the minefield, silently waiting for you to accidentally step on it. Just like the minefield, JavaScript’s mines are hidden in plain sight. Entire books have been written about all the mines present in JavaScript. Maybe I’ll get into what some of those are in future blog posts. Now, if you are going to venture into a minefield, you need a way to avoid stepping on a mine. You need either a safe path through the minefield or a detailed map of all the mine locations.

Douglas Crockford was trying to provide a safe path through the JavaScript minefield when he wrote JavaScript: The Good Parts. He did an admirable job at laying out a subset of the language that was sufficient but avoided many of the mines. However, the problem with any safe path through a minefield is that if you ever stray from the path, it doesn’t help at all.

This article is Part 1 in a 6-Part Series.

• Part 1 - This Article
• Part 2 - Why TypeScript Isn't the Answer
• Part 3 - Why Dart Isn't the Answer
• Part 4 - Why CoffeeScript Isn't the Answer
• Part 5 - Are JavaScript Linters the Answer?
• Part 6 - What I Think CoffeeScript Should Have Been

I’ve worked on large projects in both javascript and coffeescript, and guess what?  You can build an application in either one, and your decision of javascript or coffeescript is not going to make or break you.

If you are working on a project by yourself, then I would pick whichever language you prefer working in.  It’s totally subjective, but you are going to be more productive coding in a language that you like coding in vs. one that you hate coding in.

Now, for the tricky part.  What if you’re working on a team?

If you’re a Ruby developer working with Rails, at some point you’re going to need to work with JavaScript. While the two languages have many similarities, the fundamental differences in their object models can be quite jarring. CoffeeScript helps to provide a more Ruby-like syntax, but if you’re not careful you can introduce bugs to your code in surprising ways.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say we have an expensive operation, and need to cache the result.