CoffeeScript Application Development

Compiling from a CoffeeScript file

Now that you've tried out the CoffeeScript console, let's try compiling a file. The console is great for trying out ideas and rapidly getting feedback from your code, but you'll do most of your work in CoffeeScript files, which you then compile to JavaScript.

Let's start with a very simple CoffeeScript file. CoffeeScript conventionally uses the .coffee extension, so let's name our file setup.coffee.

alert "Welcome!"

Note

The first thing that might jump out at you in this code is the lack of parentheses. In CoffeeScript parentheses are optional when calling a function, unless the function takes no arguments, or they are needed to resolve ambiguity.

Now let's compile this file to JavaScript. Run this from your terminal, ...