Book Image

Modern JavaScript Web Development Cookbook

By : Federico Kereki
Book Image

Modern JavaScript Web Development Cookbook

By: Federico Kereki

Overview of this book

JavaScript has evolved into a language that you can use on any platform. Modern JavaScript Web Development Cookbook is a perfect blend of solutions for traditional JavaScript development and modern areas that developers have lately been exploring with JavaScript. This comprehensive guide teaches you how to work with JavaScript on servers, browsers, mobile phones and desktops. You will start by exploring the new features of ES8. You will then move on to learning the use of ES8 on servers (with Node.js), with the objective of producing services and microservices and dealing with authentication and CORS. Once you get accustomed to ES8, you will learn to apply it to browsers using frameworks, such as React and Redux, which interact through Ajax with services. You will then understand the use of a modern framework to develop the UI. In addition to this, development for mobile devices with React Native will walk you through the benefits of creating native apps, both for Android and iOS. Finally, you’ll be able to apply your new-found knowledge of server-side and client-side tools to develop applications with Electron.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Serving static files

We are planning to create a set of REST services, but it's very possible that your server will also have to serve some static files, such as images, PDFs, and so on. On principle, you could do this by hand by setting specific routes for each static asset, and then writing a function that would read the required file and stream its contents to the client; we did something like that in the Working with streams to process requests section in the previous chapter.

However, this is such a common and reiterative task that Express provides a simpler solution; let's look at how we can simply serve static files.

An even better solution would be to have another server, such as nginx, in your stack and have it handle static files. Standard servers are much better at handling this type of simple request, and will leave your Node code free to handle more complex...