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 Flow

Flow is mainly a static type checker for JavaScript code. The purpose of a static type checker is to ensure at build time that everything works together as it should. As a result, we should see a lot fewer errors at runtime. In fact, proper usage of a static type checker will essentially eliminate all simple bugs and let us focus on solving the algorithmic and behavioral issues that would arise anyway.

In Flow, every JavaScript file can be changed to a Flow file. All that needs to be done is to introduce the @flow comment. A simple example is as follows:

// @flow
function square(n: number): number {
  return n * n;
}
square("2"); // Error!

Even though the code would work pretty well in standard JavaScript, Flow will help us by raising an error in the last line. The square function has been annotated using types for the n input argument and the return value. The colon notation separates the identifier or function head from the specified type.

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