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

Modules


As mentioned in Chapter 1The Importance of Good Code, clean code should be structured in a modular way. In the next few sections, we'll introduce you to the concept of modular design, before explaining the different module formats. Then, for the rest of the chapter, we will begin composing our project by incorporating existing Node modules.

 

But first, let's remind ourselves why modular design is important. Without it, the following apply:

  • Logic from one business domain can easily be interwoven with that of another
  • When debugging, it's hard to identify where the bug is
  • There'll likely be duplicate code

Instead, writing modular code means the following:

  • Modules are logical separations of domains—for example, for a simple social network, you might have a module for user accounts, one for user profiles, one for posts, one for comments, and so on. This ensures a clear separation of concerns.
  • Each module should have a very specific purpose—that is, it should be granular. This ensures that...