Book Image

Building Serverless Web Applications

By : Diego Zanon
Book Image

Building Serverless Web Applications

By: Diego Zanon

Overview of this book

This book will equip you with the knowledge needed to build your own serverless apps by showing you how to set up different services while making your application scalable, highly available, and efficient. We begin by giving you an idea of what it means to go serverless, exploring the pros and cons of the serverless model and its use cases. Next, you will be introduced to the AWS services that will be used throughout the book, how to estimate costs, and how to set up and use the Serverless Framework. From here, you will start to build an entire serverless project of an online store, beginning with a React SPA frontend hosted on AWS followed by a serverless backend with API Gateway and Lambda functions. You will also learn to access data from a SimpleDB database, secure the application with authentication and authorization, and implement serverless notifications for browsers using AWS IoT. This book will describe how to monitor the performance, efficiency, and errors of your apps and conclude by teaching you how to test and deploy your applications.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Getting started with React


Teaching frontend tools is not the objective of this book, but we need to build something useful to see how serverless deals with modern frontend development. We will use React here because it is currently one of the most popular tools. If you don't know what React is or how to use it, I'll guide you to understand the basic concepts.

React principles

The first thing you should note is that React is a library and not a framework. The difference is that a library provides a set of functionalities to solve a specific problem, and a framework provides a set of libraries centered on a particular methodology.

React is only responsible for of your application. That's the problem React solves. If you need to make Ajax calls or handle page routes, you need to add other libraries, you need to think about components. Your user interface is a composition of simple components, where each one of them has an inner state and an HTML definition. When using React, you don't manipulate...