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 Webpack

Webpack is presumably the most popular option among the available bundlers. It is also among the oldest bundlers – dating back to a time when Node.js was still young and the whole idea of bundling was rather new. At this time, task runners were still dominantly used. However, the increasing complexity of frontend development opened the door for much more elaborate tooling.

One thing that makes Webpack stand out is its ecosystem. From the very beginning, Webpack decided to develop only a very shallow core focusing on module resolution. In some sense, Webpack is just the wrapper holding all these plugins together with a fixed plan of execution. It pretty much combines the configuration that was thrown in by the user, with the power of all the selected plugins.

Today, Webpack can also work without plugins or a configuration. At least in theory. In practice, every project that goes beyond some simple examples will require a bit of configuration. Also, interesting...