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

Chapter 9. Designing Our API

In the last few chapters, we have followed a TDD approach to implement our Create User endpoint. However, a user directory application needs to do much more: retrieve, edit, delete, and search for users. In this chapter, we want you to practice what you've learned and implement these endpoints yourself.

To help you design an API that is easy to use, we will outline some principles of API design. Specifically, we will:

  • Discuss what REST is, and what it is not
  • Learn to design our API to be consistent, fast, intuitive, and simple
  • Understand the different types of consistency: Common, Local, Transversal, Domain, and Perennial