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)

Adding authentication with JWT

For any server-based application, one challenge that must be solved is authentication, and our RESTful server therefore will need a solution for that. In traditional web pages, sessions and cookies may be used, but if you are using an API, there's no guarantee that requests will come from a browser; in fact, they may very well come from another server. Adding this to the fact that HTTP is stateless, and that RESTful services are also supposed to be so, we need another mechanism, and JSON Web Tokens (JWT) is an often used solution.

JWT is sometimes read aloud as JOT; see Section 1 of the RFC at https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7519.

The idea with JWT is that the client will first exchange valid credentials (such as username and password) with a server and get back a token, which will afterwards give them access to the server's resources...