Using CoffeeScript with Brunch
If your application is completely client-side, you don't need a server framework like Rails or Node to execute backend logic, but you still need a way to build your assets. If CoffeeScript is the only preprocessing you need to do on your application, the simplest way to do this is using the command-line tool. However, you might want a more formal framework for organizing your project, or you might have other build steps involved in preparing your client-side project.
Brunch is a very popular choice for these situations. Brunch describes itself as an "assembler for HTML5 applications". It can compile a number of popular formats into their web-ready counterparts, like Haml into HTML, Sass into CSS, and of course CoffeeScript into JavaScript. Brunch also packages, concatenates, and minifies these files so you can write code without worrying about the build step. We'll port our pet shop application to Brunch to try out the CoffeeScript compilation and other features...
