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 Bun for bundling web apps

While Deno seems quite different from Node.js on first glance, it also offers a lot of similarities. After all, both runtimes use V8 and can work with ESMs, but what if you want to be even more compatible with Node.js? Another approach is to be Node.js-compatible without using libuv or V8 at all. Enter Bun.

Bun is an alternative to Node.js that follows the approach of Deno in terms of developer friendliness. Here, tooling such as a npm client or an application bundler is also included out of the box. However, to speed things up significantly, Bun does not use libuv and V8. Instead, Bun is created using the programming language Zig and uses JavaScriptCore as its JavaScript runtime. JavaScriptCore is also the runtime behind the Webkit browser engine, empowering browsers such as Safari.

The main benefits of Bun are as follows:

  • It comes with useful utilities out of the box, such as a bundler, a transpiler, a package manager, and a task runner...