QuickUI now lets you create user interface controls in CoffeeScript

QuickUI now supports the use and creation of web user interface controls in CoffeeScript, a language that adds many useful features to the JavaScript language. Through its compiler, CoffeeScript can be easily used as a replacement for JavaScript in many web projects.

QuickUI turns out to be a natural fit for CoffeeScript. One of the nice features in CoffeeScript is that you can create classes with the language’s built-in “class” syntax. You can take advantage of that syntax to create new QuickUI control classes, simply by extending the base Control class or any other control class:

# A simple button class in CoffeeScript
class window.HelloButton extends BasicButton
  constructor: -> return Control.coffee()
  inherited:
    content: "Hello, world!"
  genericSupport: true

QuickUI control classes are subclasses of jQuery, so one of the key features in QuickUI’s new support for CoffeeScript is actually being able to create jQuery subclasses in CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript generates a prototype-based class that is similar to the classes produced by jQuery’s $.sub() feature (a core part of jQuery that will be moved to a plugin in jQuery 1.8), but jQuery’s classes require a rather Byzantine construction sequence. This is handled through the boilerplate constructor shown above. When Control.coffee() is called, it fixes up the CoffeeScript class so that it conforms to jQuery’s notion of how its class constructors should work.

With this in place, it’s now possible to create QuickUI controls in CoffeeScript with significantly less source code than the equivalent plain JavaScript. This is an overall win for web UI developers. If your team hasn’t already taken a look at CoffeeScript, now might be a good time.

Creating QuickUI controls in CoffeeScript currently requires a plugin, but the plan is to fold CoffeeScript support directly into the quickui.js runtime. Read the documentation for QuickUI support of CoffeeScript for more details.