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

Picking a testing framework


While there's only one de facto testing framework for E2E tests for JavaScript (Cucumber), there are several popular testing frameworks for unit and integration tests, namely Jasmine (jasmine.github.io), Mocha (mochajs.org), Jest (jestjs.io), and AVA (github.com/avajs/ava).

We will be using Mocha for this book, but let's understand the rationale behind that decision. As always, there are pros and cons for each choice:

  • Maturity: Jasmine and Mocha have been around for the longest, and for many years were the only two viable testing frameworks for JavaScript and Node. Jest and AVA are the new kids on the block. Generally, the maturity of a library correlates with the number of features and the level of support.
  • Popularity: Generally, the more popular a library is, the larger the community, and the higher likelihood of receiving support when things go awry. In terms of popularity, let's examine several metrics (correct as of September 7, 2018):
    • GitHub stars@ Jest (20...