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

Benefits of Node.js


JavaScript is the language of the browser. There's no denying that. Next, let's examine the reasons why a developer should pick Node.js as the back-end language for their application. Although there are many reasons, here we've boiled it down to two factors—context switching and shared code.

Context switching

Context switching, or task switching, is when a developer is working on multiple projects, or in different languages, at the same time and has to switch between them regularly.

"Doing more than one task at a time, especially more than one complex task, takes a toll on productivity."                                               

                – Multitasking: Switching costs (American Psychological Association)

                     (http://www.apa.org/research/action/multitask.aspx)

Switching between projects

Programming is an activity that requires you to keep many variables in memory at the same time—variable names, interfaces of different modules, application structure...