To summarise, I have to say it was a very productive week with many hours spent on development. More than in a normal work week. But I believe it was worth putting in the extra hours to see the final result. CoffeeScript was a very nice discovery and made writing JavaScript really nice. It was hard though to change my mind about some ways things get written but once past that, all was well. Almost. At some point the code[...]

For our web application we used a javascript framework called Backbone, which helped us to keep our application logically structured. We’ve been able to split JavaScript into nice seperate chunks working together. Backbone uses models to represent the data that can be created, validated, destroyed or saved. The models can be saved in local storage or on the server as simply as setting the apropriate url value (to a RESTful API) or local storage variable. Making it save in both places[...]

What is CoffeeScript? It’s a little language that compiles into JavaScript. And it’s so much simpler to write and look at than original Javascript. And the best part of it? Underneath it all it is still pure JavaScript! I have to admit I was a bit sceptical at first. After looking at the documentation the syntax looked funky, and I thought that I would have to install a compiler, then run it every time I want to have a working[...]