I have been using RailwayJS for a couple of weeks with great satisfaction and joy. Its built-in support for CoffeeScript files is fantastic. That being said, like a majority of other NodeJS web frameworks (e.g. Geddy, Tower.js, SocketStream, FlatIron) it doesn’t provide a way to ship client-side CoffeeScript files. (In this context, Meteor represents a notable exception, where it is capable of handling CoffeeScript files both at the server- and client-side.)

To establish a complete CoffeeScript experience both at the server- and client-side, one can use connect-assets by Trevor Burnham to auto-compile assets (i.e., CoffeeScript, Stylus, LESS files) on-the-fly. For this purpose, you just need to (1) add a app.use require('connect-assets')() line to your environment.coffee, (2) create js and css folders under assets directory, and you are ready to go.

One minor glitch that you need to pay attention is, while using connect-assets, you must include asset files using accessor functions – js() and css() – provided by connect-assets. These functions in addition to generating necessary <script src="..."></script> tag, also register the file into the asset processor service. connect-assets auto-compiles an asset the first time it is called and caches the produced output in memory; later calls will be served from the cache. (It also provides options to write produced outputs to disk and watch file changes.) For instance, say you want to use /assets/js/main.coffee in /app/views/main/index.ejs file. For this purpose, you need to add <%- js('main') %> into your view for enabling connect-assets serving your main.coffee file.

As a final note, since connect-assets is a Connect plugin, you should be able to run it on any other web framework that runs on Connect or ExpressJS.