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

Integrating Native Code with WebAssembly

The whole point of actually using Node.js is convenience. Node.js never aspired to be the fastest runtime, the most complete one, or the most secure one. However, Node.js established a quick and powerful ecosystem that was capable of developing a set of tools and utilities to actually empower the web development standards that we are all used to today.

With the growth of Node.js, the demand for more specialized systems also increased. The rise of new runtimes that offered alternatives to Node.js actually resulted from this need. An interesting alternative can be found in the WebAssembly language. WebAssembly is a portable binary-code format like the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) or the Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL). This makes it a potential compilation offering for any language – especially lower-level languages such as C or Rust.

In this chapter, you’ll learn what WebAssembly has to offer, how you can integrate existing...