Book Image

Modern Frontend Development with Node.js

By : Florian Rappl
5 (1)
Book Image

Modern Frontend Development with Node.js

5 (1)
By: Florian Rappl

Overview of this book

Almost a decade after the release of Node.js, the tooling used by frontend developers is fully embracing this cross-platform JavaScript runtime, which is sadly often limited to server-side web development. This is where this Node.js book comes in, showing you what this popular runtime has to offer and how you can unlock its full potential to create frontend-focused web apps. You’ll begin by learning the basics and internals of Node.js, before discovering how to divide your code into modules and packages. Next, you’ll get to grips with the most popular package managers and their uses and find out how to use TypeScript and other JavaScript variants with Node.js. Knowing which tool to use when is crucial, so this book helps you understand all the available state-of-the-art tools in Node.js. You’ll interact with linters such as ESLint and formatters such as Prettier. As you advance, you’ll become well-versed with the Swiss Army Knife for frontend developers – the bundler. You’ll also explore various testing utilities, such as Jest, for code quality verification. Finally, you’ll be able to publish your code in reusable packages with ease. By the end of this web development book, you’ll have gained the knowledge to confidently choose the right code structure for your repositories with all that you’ve learned about monorepos.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Node.js Fundamentals
5
Part 2: Tooling
10
Part 3: Advanced Topics

Writing isomorphic libraries

The holy grail of web development is the ability to write code not solely for the frontend or the backend but for both parts. Many frameworks and tools try to give us this capability.

To be accessible to multiple platforms, we not only need to ship multiple variants of our code but also only use APIs that are available on all supported platforms. For instance, if you want to make an HTTP request, then using fetch would be the right call for modern browsers. However, fetch was not available in less recent versions of Node.js. Therefore, you might need to solve this differently.

In the case of HTTP requests, there are already isomorphic libraries available – that is, libraries that will just do the right thing depending on the target runtime. You should only depend on these libraries.

Isomorphic fetch

The HTTP request problem can be solved in many ways – that is, by choosing an isomorphic library such as axios or isomorphic-fetch...