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 esbuild

esbuild is quite a new tool that focuses on performance. The key to esbuild’s enhanced performance is that it was written from the ground up in the Go programming language. The result is a native binary that has certain advantages over pure JavaScript solutions.

If esbuild stopped at providing a native solution, it would potentially not be qualified to make this list. After all, flexibility and the option to extend the original functionality are key for any kind of bundler. Luckily, the creator of esbuild has thought about this and come up with an elegant solution. While the core of esbuild remains native – that is, written in Go and provided as a binary – plugins can be written using JavaScript. This way, we get the best of both worlds.

To get started with esbuild, we need to install the esbuild package using npm:

$ npm install esbuild --save-dev

With this one installation, you can use esbuild programmatically, as well as directly from...