Clay McCoy

Presentations

Taking JavaScript Seriously in Grails (AngularJS and CoffeeScript)

Ever feel like you throw all software craftsmanship discipline out the window when you write JavaScript? It's just you and the browser refresh button until you get it right. Maybe you have jQuery to somewhat shield you from browser quirks. Maybe you even kept your project from devolving to the point where every page is its own JavaScript app without hope of reuse. Even then JavaScript is still likely a second class language in your project. Surprisingly, this state of affairs is normal. I want to take client side scripting just as seriously as any other code in my Grails web app. I want tests, structure, and less boilerplate.

I'll show how to use AngularJS and CoffeeScript to do that. Grails and AngularJS are both MVC web frameworks that make heavy use of dependency injection and have great support for testing. AngularJS may even be a more Grailsy way to handle the view layer than what Grails provides out of the box.