Structuring coffeescript code?

Question

Under Rails 3.1, I\'m trying to find out how to move a few coffeescript classes away from my controller default coffeescript file (home.js.coffee) into another

Answer 1

While using the window object as a place to share functionality among different parts of your code can work quite well, it can get somewhat ugly when you're working on a big/complex codebase. Also, you have to handle loading all of the dependencies manually, which can get somewhat frustrating too. Many people just end up loading everything in every request, regardless of what's actually needed for that particular page.

There are plenty of libraries built in an attempt to solve those issues and make exporting and importing functionality among files more managable. One of the more common ones today is RequireJS which is an implementation of the CommonJS AMD specs. You can find other libraries and a comparison between them here, and there's a great tutorial on how to write modular JavaScript using those libraries over at Addy Osmani blog - which also talks about the new upcoming modules system in ES.next, which is quite interesting too.

I personally really like NodeJS's modules system (with the exports object and the require function), so I use node-browserify to package it up for working on the client side too. While that doesn't allow dynamically loading dependencies in an asynchronous way as the AMD specs does, it does allow to nicely share the same JavaScript code on both the client-side and server-side, which is a huge bonus for me (mainly because I'm working with NodeJS on the server side too, so I'm not sure how important that might be for you) and it handles packaging all of the dependencies together nicely for you (so they can be synchronously require()d) by parsing your JavaScript code and looking for plain require() calls to determine what a given script requires in order to run.