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

Summary

In this chapter, you extended your knowledge of potential source code files running in Node.js. You are now familiar with running WASM – a lower-level portable binary-code language that can be used as a compilation target by many programming languages.

WASM can help you to write functionality once and run it on multiple platforms. Since WASM can be sandboxed very well, it is a good contender for the next wave of containerized computing, where performance and security are valued highly. You now know how to write WASM using AssemblyScript. You are also empowered to integrate created WASM modules in Node.js.

In the next and final chapter, we will take a look at the use of JavaScript beyond Node.js. We’ll see that other runtimes exist, which are partially compatible with the Node.js ecosystem – providing a great drop-in replacement that can be handy for multiple use cases.