Chapter 1. Getting Started with Isomorphic Web Apps
Welcome to the book on building isomorphic web applications where we will discuss the main challenges associated with building isomorphic (also known as universal) apps and will walk through the process of building a simple web application so you can learn by example.
In this chapter, we will give a brief overview of isomorphic apps; you will learn what makes your application code isomorphic; see how simple it is to get your first isomorphic application running and what a good project structure for an isomorphic app could be.
By the end of the chapter, we will have a basic working web application, powered by Node.js, Express, and React 16.
To bring it all together, we will cover the following topics:
- What are isomorphic apps?
- How to write isomorphic JavaScript code?
- Introduction to React.js
- Sample application description
- What we need to get started
- Install project dependencies
- The basic project structure
- Creating the first React component
- How to render a React app on both client and server
- How to run and test our app locally