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

Comparing available bundlers

There are multiple generations of bundlers. The first generation was centered around the belief that Node.js applications are the only kind of applications that should be written. Therefore, changing these applications into JavaScript files that work in the browser has been the primary concern of the bundlers from that generation. The most popular one in that category is Browserify.

The second generation went on to extend the idea from the first generation to pretty much all JavaScript code. Here, even HTML and CSS assets could be understood. For instance, using @import rules in CSS would extend the module graph to another CSS module. Importantly, while the CommonJS (or later on, ESM) syntax was still used to derive the JavaScript module graph, these second-generation bundlers did not care about Node.js. They always assumed that the code was written for the browser. Quite often, however, you could change the target and also bundle code for Node.js with...