Book Image

Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

By : Daniel Li
Book Image

Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

By: Daniel Li

Overview of this book

With the over-abundance of tools in the JavaScript ecosystem, it's easy to feel lost. Build tools, package managers, loaders, bundlers, linters, compilers, transpilers, typecheckers - how do you make sense of it all? In this book, we will build a simple API and React application from scratch. We begin by setting up our development environment using Git, yarn, Babel, and ESLint. Then, we will use Express, Elasticsearch and JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) to build a stateless API service. For the front-end, we will use React, Redux, and Webpack. A central theme in the book is maintaining code quality. As such, we will enforce a Test-Driven Development (TDD) process using Selenium, Cucumber, Mocha, Sinon, and Istanbul. As we progress through the book, the focus will shift towards automation and infrastructure. You will learn to work with Continuous Integration (CI) servers like Jenkins, deploying services inside Docker containers, and run them on Kubernetes. By following this book, you would gain the skills needed to build robust, production-ready applications.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Free Chapter
1
The Importance of Good Code
Index

State management tools


There are many state management libraries out there, with the two most popular being Redux and MobX.

Redux

In Redux, you keep the state of your application inside an object literal that belongs to a store. When the state needs to be changed, an action describing what has happened should be emitted.

Then, you'd define a set of reducer functions, each responding to different types of actions. The purpose of a reducer is to generate a new state object that’ll replace the last one:

This way, updating the state no longer requires calling 20 different onChange functions.

However, you'd still need to pass the state via the props of many components. There’s a way to mitigate this through the use of selectors; but more on that later.

MobX

Mobx incorporates functional reactive programming principles, and uses observables as its stores:

You can tag entities (for example, objects and arrays) as observables using the @observable decorator. You can also tag some functions with the @computed...