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

Advantages of using WebAssembly

WebAssembly (WASM) is a language without any runtime. Any kind of functionality – from allocating some memory to making an HTTP request – needs to be integrated by the consuming application. There are, however, some emerging standards such as the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) that aim to bring a set of standard functionalities to any platform. This way, we can write platform-independent applications using WASM, with a runner integrating WASI.

WASI specification

The WASI specification covers everything that is needed to run WASM outside of a browser. Popular WASM runtimes such as Wasmtime or Wasmer implement WASI to actually run WASM applications. WASI specifies how system resources can be accessed by WASM. As a result, besides having WASI implemented in the runtime, the executed WASM code also needs to know (and use) the API provided by WASI. More details can be found at https://wasi.dev/.

Consequently, one of the advantages...