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

Integrating Babel

In the last decade, JavaScript ascended from a simple scripting language to the most used programming language in the whole world. With the increased popularity, the language has also gotten a lot of interesting features. Unfortunately, it always takes a while until the latest features are made available in all implementations. The problem gets worse if we want to use the latest language features in old implementations anyway.

This is a problem that has been known by frontend developers for years – after all, the version and variety of the browser used cannot be predetermined by the developer. Only the user makes this decision – and an older browser may not understand some of the modern features that the developer wants to use. In Node.js, we don’t have exactly the same problem – as we can theoretically decide the version of Node.js – but it can be a similar issue if Node.js does not have the latest language features or if we...