Book Image

Mastering JavaScript Single Page Application Development

Book Image

Mastering JavaScript Single Page Application Development

Overview of this book

Single-page web applications—or SPAs, as they are commonly referred to—are quickly becoming the de facto standard for web app development. The fact that a major part of the app runs inside a single web page makes it very interesting and appealing. Also, the accelerated growth of browser capabilities is pushing us closer to the day when all apps will run entirely in the browser. This book will take your JavaScript development skills to the next level by teaching you to create a single-page application within a full-stack JavaScript environment. Using only JavaScript, you can go from being a front-end developer to a full-stack application developer with relative ease. You will learn to cross the boundary from front-end development to server-side development through the use of JavaScript on both ends. Use your existing knowledge of JavaScript by learning to manage a JSON document data store with MongoDB, writing a JavaScript powered REST API with Node.js and Express, and designing a front-end powered by AngularJS. This book will teach you to leverage the MEAN stack to do everything from document database design, routing REST web API requests, data-binding within views, and adding authentication and security to building a full-fledged, complex, single-page web application. In addition to building a full-stack JavaScript app, you will learn to test it with JavaScript-powered testing tools such as Mocha, Karma, and Jasmine. Finally, you will learn about deployment and scaling so that you can launch your own apps into the real world.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering JavaScript Single Page Application Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Organized with NPM, Bower, and Grunt
13
Testing with Mocha, Karma, and More

The original MVC pattern


The MVC software architectural pattern has existed in one form or another since the 1970s, but it became more popular and generally accepted with its use in web application frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, CakePHP, and Django. MVC frameworks like these brought a higher level of organization and sophistication to web application development than had been previously conceived, and in doing so, paved the way for modern SPA development.

To understand the relevance of MVC to modern SPA development, let's first break down the components and ideology of MVC.

The Model

The Model component of MVC deals with an application's data. This includes data that is displayed to the user, received from the user, and stored in the database. Additionally, the Model handles all Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) operations with the database. Many frameworks also use the Model to handle an application's business logic, or how the data should be manipulated before being saved or viewed,...