Book Image

Hands-On Full Stack Web Development with Aurelia

By : Diego Argüelles Rojas, Erikson Murrugarra
Book Image

Hands-On Full Stack Web Development with Aurelia

By: Diego Argüelles Rojas, Erikson Murrugarra

Overview of this book

Hands-On Full Stack Web Development with Aurelia begins with a review of basic JavaScript concepts and the structure of an Aurelia application generated with the Aurelia-CLI tool. You will learn how to create interesting and intuitive application using the Aurelia-Materialize plugin, which implements the material design approach. Once you fully configure a FIFA World Cup 2018 app, you'll start creating the initial components through TDD practices and then develop backend services to process and store all the user data. This book lets you explore the NoSQL model and implement it using one of the most popular NoSQL databases, MongoDB, with some exciting libraries to make the experience effortless. You'll also be able to add some advanced behavior to your components, from managing the lifecycle properly to using dynamic binding, field validations, and the custom service layer. You will integrate your application with Google OAuth Service and learn best practices to secure your applications. Furthermore, you'll write UI Testing scripts to create high-quality Aurelia Apps and explore the most used tools to run end-to-end tests. In the concluding chapters, you'll be able to deploy your application to the Cloud and Docker containers. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to create rich applications using best practices and modern approaches.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Automating tasks with Gulp


In the previous section, we learned how to use a CSS preprocessor and how to compile this SASS/LESS code into pure CSS to be interpreted by the browser. Note that each time you make a change, you will need to recompile the entire file, which means that you will need to type the same command and do the same task one, two, and several times. Yes, it's really boring. Fortunately, we have task automation tools. What does that mean? Some other tool will do the dirty job for us.

Understanding Gulp

Gulp is an open source JavaScript-based task runner, which uses code-over-configuration approach to define its tasks. These could be the following:

  • Bundling and minifying libraries and style sheets
  • Refreshing your browser when you save a file
  • Quickly running unit tests
  • Running code analysis
  • LESS/SASS to CSS compilation
  • Copying modified files to an output directory

This tool uses the stream module of Node.js; first of all, we need to define what a stream is. It can be defined as a tool...