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

Understanding the fundamentals of REST


REST is the architectural style used to serve web pages and make requests on the World Wide Web, or simply the Web. Although the Internet and the Web are often referred to interchangeably, they differ in the fact that the Web is merely a part of the Internet.

The Web is a collection of documents, or web pages, which are served or hosted on computers all over the world and are connected via hyperlinks, or what are commonly referred to as links. These links are served over HTTP, the language of communication for the Web. REST is often confused with HTTP because of its mutual relationship with the Web, but HTTP and REST are far from the same thing.

Understanding an architectural style versus a protocol

REST is an architectural style, while HTTP is an application layer protocol. This means that while HTTP is the language of communication on the Web, REST is simply a set of rules for performing requests and operations on the Web. These operations performed...