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

Being universal with UMD

When the UMD specification was brought up, there was a lot of hype in the community. After all, the label universal already claims that UMD is the final module system – the one to rule them all. It tries to do this by supporting essentially three different kinds of JavaScript module formats:

  • The classic way of doing things without a module system – that is, just by running JavaScript using <script> tags in the browser
  • The CommonJS format that is used by Node.js
  • The previously discussed asynchronously loaded modules from the AMD specification

When you write a JavaScript file with the UMD specification in mind, you essentially make sure that every popular JavaScript runtime can read it. For instance, UMD works perfectly in Node.js and the browser.

To achieve this universality, UMD makes an educated guess regarding what module system can be used and selects it. For example, if a define function is detected, then AMD...