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

Improving Reliability with Testing Tools

Now that we can actually write and build our code for the browser efficiently, it makes sense to also consider verifying the code’s output. Does it really fulfill the given requirements? Has anything changed in terms of the expected outcome? Does the code crash when unexpected values are passed in?

What we need to answer these questions is testing. Testing can mean a lot of things – and depending on who you ask, you’ll get a different answer to the question “What should we test?” In this chapter, we’ll walk through the different options that interest us as developers. We’ll see what tools exist to automate these tests and how we can set them up and use them practically.

We will start our journey into the testing space with a discussion on the beloved testing pyramid. We will then continue by learning about the types of test tools – most notably, pure runners and whole frameworks....