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

Why use data binding?


Data binding provides a layer of abstraction that can eliminate the need for a lot of additional application wiring, custom event publishing and subscribing, and Model evaluation against the View. These things are usually handled with custom application code that is specific to the application itself, when a framework or some type of data binding is not being used. Without careful planning and the use of defined architectural patterns, this can lead to a lot of adjunct code, and subsequently a code base that is not extensible, does not scale well, and is difficult for new developers to take on and learn.

If you feel that data binding is a component you'd like to include in your application, then consider your options, some of which we have laid out here, and choose accordingly. You may see the need to build your application with a full-fledged JavaScript framework such as AngularJS, or you may only want the added abstraction layer of data binding in combination with...