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

Building Web Apps with Bundlers

In the previous chapter, we covered an important set of auxiliary tooling – linters and formatters. While code quality is important, the undoubtedly most important aspect of every project is what is shipped and used by the customer. This is the area where a special kind of tooling – called bundlers – shines.

A bundler is a tool that understands and processes source code to produce files that can be placed on a web server and are ready to be consumed by web browsers. It takes HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and related files into consideration to make them more efficient and readable. In this process, a bundler would merge, split, minify, and even translate code from one standard such as ES2020 into another standard such as ES5.

Today, bundlers are no longer nice to have, but necessarily used for most projects directly or indirectly. Pretty much every web framework offers tooling that is built upon a bundler. Often, the challenge is...