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

Dividing Code into Modules and Packages

One of the most important aspects to consider when writing professional software is reusability. Reusability means that parts of our code base can be purposed to work in several places or under different circumstances. This implies that we can actually use existing functionality quite easily.

As we learned, a key part of the Node.js success story is down to the fact that it comes with a module system. So far, we’ve only touched upon the basic concept of CommonJS, which is the default way of importing and exporting functionality from modules.

In this chapter, we’ll take the chance to become familiar with more module formats, including their history, use cases, and development models. We’ll learn how to divide our code into modules and packages efficiently. In addition to learning about CommonJS, we will see what a package is and how we can define our own packages. All in all, this will help us to achieve great reusability...