Hipster Dev Stack

CoffeeScript? That’s so 2012. We’re already porting our stuff to Six the ECMAScript 6 pre-processor. I guess you wouldn’t have heard of it yet but you will soon because we’ll be making sure everyone can overhear us affecting blasé detachment whilst discussing it in the latest pop-up dirty food joint.

Whether you’re dealing with any asynchronous programming or just want an opportunity to drop a nonchalant “oh, you’re using traditional Coffeescript?” into conversations then Iced Coffeescript could be for you.

It adds await and defer keywords to the language to let you cleanly manage joining after asynchronous callbacks. Reading the documentation you start out all “whatever” as the first example doesn’t seem to offer a great advantage but as the examples get more complex & the vanilla Coffeescript (see, that gave me a nice elitist glow inside) required grows more & more convoluted the Iced syntax starts to shine.

I guess the big questions are; how well maintained it will be as Coffeescript itself matures? is there any chance of this stuff getting ported back? and is it going to cause any undue hassles such as generating hellishly difficult to debug JavaScript?

End-to-end testing web apps can be trickier than doing trackstands on your fixie without spilling your flat white. Tools are often a pain to get running, test suites awkward to organise. Do you test in-browser with JS or using something like Selenium? Ugh, total drag.

Casper JS on the other hand is crazy simple to set up and use. It sits on top of Phantom JS (oh, you really haven’t heard of that? It’s a pretty cool headless WebKit implementation). Casper provides a friendly API layer in much the way that Geb complements Selenium.

Casper can run individual Java/Coffeescript files or directory trees, interact with the file system to upload or save, can output JUnit-compatible reports & grab screenshots.

It will be interesting to try to work up a complex page object model & really put it through its paces with richer interactions but the simple stuff I’ve tried so far has been promising.