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

Problems with manual deployment


Here are some of the weaknesses in our current approach:

  • Lack of consistency: Most enterprise-level applications are developed by a team. It is likely that each team member will use a different operating system, or otherwise configure their machine differently from others. This means that the environment of each team members’ local machine will be different from each other, and by extension, from the production servers'. Therefore, even if all our tests pass locally, it does not guarantee that it will pass on production.
  • Lack of independence: When a few services depend on a shared library, they must all use the same version of the library.
  • Time-consuming and error-prone: Every time we want a new environment (staging/production) or the same environment in multiple locations, we need to manually deploy a new VPS instance and repeat the same steps to configure users, firewalls, and install the necessary packages. This produces two problems:
    • Time-consuming: Manual...