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

Exploring the Deno runtime

While Node.js is a tremendous success story, not everyone is a fan. Some critics say that the huge fragmentation combined with the lack of system controls offers too great an attack surface. In the past, we’ve seen countless attacks that have abused the vulnerabilities introduced by exactly this problem.

Another issue is that Node.js did have to invent a lot of APIs – for example, to interact with the filesystem. There was no API available in the browser that looked similar to what was desired. Of course, as we now know, the browser APIs kept improving and even things such as filesystem access are implemented there. However, the APIs never aligned, mostly because the variants for Node.js are neither controllable nor fully asynchronous.

Surely, the aforementioned problems were all known for a while, but it took several years until an alternative implementation to solve these issues appeared. Again, it was Ryan Dahl – the original...