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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about a set of different module formats as alternatives to the CommonJS module format. You have been introduced to the current standard approach of writing ESMs, which brings a module system directly to the JavaScript language.

You also saw how alternative module formats such as AMD or UMD can be used to run JavaScript modules on other older JavaScript runtimes. We discussed that by using the specialized module loader, SystemJS, you can actually make use of truly convenient and current features as a web standard today. The need for import maps is particularly striking when talking about third-party dependencies.

You learned that most third-party dependencies are actually deployed in the form of packages. In this chapter, you also saw how a package.json file defines the root of a package and what kind of data may be included in package.json file.

In the next chapter, we will learn how packages using the discussed formats can be installed...