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

Chapter 2. The State of JavaScript

avaScript has not traditionally been considered a backend language; that space belonged to the likes of Java, Python, C/C++, C#/.NET, PHP, Ruby and so on. JavaScript was just a 'toy language' that allowed web developers to add animation to websites in order to improve its aesthetics. But this all changed with the advent of Node.js. With Node.js, developers can now write JavaScript code that executes on the server, as well as the client. In other words, developers can now write both front and backend code using the same language!

This provides huge productivity benefits, as common code can now be shared across the stack. Furthermore, developers can avoid context switching between different languages, which often breaks concentration and reduces output.

It also led to the rise in Isomorphic, or Universal, JavaScript frameworks, such as Meteor. These types of frameworks allow you to write applications entirely in JavaScript that run on both the client and the...