[Owncloud] adopting CoffeeScript in ownCloud

[Bernhard Posselt]

To clarify some things: I use it in the news app and im not planning on
pushing anything coffeescript like into core.

The selling points for me were:

* I needed a buildscript to make sure that a certain js part was
included before others (i use a cakefile for this)
* I have 30 javascript files (coffee files atm) so listing all of them
in my code before each controller method is not feasible, its also
cumbersome to add new things
* It shrinks down the lines of code from 2000 lines to 800
* It provides nice patterns like easy inheritance which I need :) (class
X extends Y is also easier to read than the whole prototype stuff to
achieve the same things)
* You can learn it fast, these are all features http://coffeescript.org/

So basically the use is limited to the news app.

On 11/26/2012 12:37 AM, Robin Appelman wrote:
> 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
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