[Owncloud] adopting CoffeeScript in ownCloud

[Robin Appelman]

On Sunday 25 November 2012 18:19:41 Alessandro Cosentino wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> In the last month, Bernhard (Raydiation) has created a branch of the apps
> repository, which he has used as a laboratory for introducing new
> technologies in the News app. The name of the branch is news_angularjs and
> CoffeScript (CS) is one of the technologies that he has tried out. Before
> merging the branch to master, I want to discuss with the rest of the list
> the adoption of CS in ownCloud.
> 
> CS (http://coffeescript.org) is an alternative syntax for javascript (js),
> which is becoming widely used. CS code is trans-compiled into javascript,
> so this doesn't add dependencies for ownCloud users. CS code is supposed to
> be more readable than js and the compiled code is supposed to run faster
> than hand-written js. Bernhard can tell you more about the success of his
> experiments with CS in the news_angularjs branch.
> 
> I don't want the News app to be the only ownCloud app to use CS. Many oC
> developers might already be comfortable with CS. If this is not the case, I
> don't want the app to be hard to maintain in the future because of this. I
> believe that people are willing to learn new things only if it's worth it
> and I am afraid that if the News app is the only app to use some
> technologies, people will just decide to work on other apps.
> 
> What do you think about using CoffeScript in ownCloud? In the Getting
> Started section (http://owncloud.org/dev/apps/getting-started/), I read
> that jquery and torch are the libraries that we use, but I don't see a
> general policy about using different js things.
> 
> Alessandro (zimba12)

I don't think it's a good idea to mix CS (or any complile-to-js language) with 
vanilla js. It splits the code base in 2 and makes it more difficult for some of 
the people to work on some of the code

(Personally I prefer TypeScript over CS but that's beside the point)

 - Robin Appelman