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

Using Alternative Runtimes

So far, you’ve seen what advantages and benefits the Node.js ecosystem offers to create great web applications. However, as with almost everything, there are a few downsides to the design decisions forming what we refer to as Node.js.

One of the biggest challenges in Node.js is the so-called dependency hell – where many small packages are put together to create a slightly larger package. Another challenge is that Node.js is not guarding any of these dependencies from accessing system resources. As such, importing anything from a third-party package may have unwanted side effects.

While ecosystem reliability and security can help us guard against dependency hell, improving performance is also an important strategy. Overall, the performance of Node.js can be regarded as decent; however, certain areas such as package resolution or processor core utilization could be improved by a fair share. Hence, performance is another area that could be...