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 Yarn

The issue with the original npm package resolution algorithm was that it was created in a resilient but naïve way. This does not mean that the algorithm was simple. Rather, here, we refer to the fact that no exotic tricks or experience optimizations have been considered. Instead of trying to optimize (that is, lower) the number of packages available on the local disk, it was designed to put the packages into the same hierarchy as they were declared in. This results in a filesystem view as shown in Figure 3.1:

Figure 3.1 – Example filesystem snapshot after installing packages using npm

The naïve way of handling package installations is certainly a great way to ensure that everything is installed correctly, but not ideal in terms of performance. Looking at Figure 3.1, there may be some optimizations possible.

Let’s add some example package names and versions to Figure 3.1 to see the opportunities for optimization. In Figure...