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 Parcel

When Parcel arrived in the community, the hype around it was massive. The reason for this was to be found in one new feature: configuration-free bundling. Parcel tried to leverage information that was already given in package.json – or configuration files written for specific tools such as Babel. Using this mechanism, the creators of Parcel thought to remove the complexity of configuring a bundler.

Ultimately, however, the whole aspect backfired in some sense. As mentioned previously, a bundler requires some flexibility. To achieve this kind of flexibility, a sound configuration system is necessary. While the configuration system of Webpack is a bit too verbose and complex, the one provided with esbuild might be a bit too low-level.

The successor of the original Parcel now also offers an optional configuration system, which tries to be right between the verbosity of Webpack and the low-level one of esbuild. This makes Parcel no longer configuration-free, but...