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 WASM with AssemblyScript

While there are many options to actually generate valid WASM, one of the most attractive ways is to use AssemblyScript. AssemblyScript is a language that looks and feels quite similar to TypeScript, making it rather easy to learn from a syntax perspective. Under the hood, however, there are still some concepts relating to WASM that need to be known in order to write mid-sized to larger AssemblyScript applications or libraries.

One of the core concepts of AssemblyScript is to model the different data types used in WASM. For instance, using integers requires the use of the i32 type.

Let’s have a look at some example code. We’ll start with a small function that expects two parameters, adds them up, and returns the result:

module.ts

export function sum(a: i32, b: i32): i32 {
  return a + b;
}

With the exception of the i32 type, everything in the preceding example looks and feels just like TypeScript. Even the file...