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

Summary


In this chapter, we've looked at technical debt, its causes, consequences, and ways to prevent it. Then, we introduced TDD as a process to avoid technical debt; we outlined its benefits, and how to implement it in your workflow. In Chapter 5Writing End-to-End Tests and Chapter 6Storing Data in Elasticsearch, we will cover in more depth the different types of tests (unit, integration, and E2E / acceptance tests).

Good code, whatever its definition, takes less time to write than bad code in the long run. It would be wise to realize this fact and have the discipline to build a strong foundation from the get-go. You can build a house on weak foundations, and it may stand for a hundred years, but build a skyscraper on a weak foundation, it'll come tumbling down quicker than you can imagine. 

"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."

                                                                                               – John F. Woods