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 test runners versus frameworks

Historically, tests for JavaScript targeting web browsers could not be just written and run automatically. The main reason was that this involved dealing with a real browser. There was no way to just pretend to run in the browser. For this reason alone, the first tools in that space have either been scripts or whole websites evaluating JavaScript or browser automation tools. The latter actually forms its own category – being at the heart of modern end-to-end tests.

The main driver for running the tests – historically, for starting everything that needs to be running to actually perform tests – is called a test runner. One of the first very successful test runners in the JavaScript space was Karma. The job of Karma was to spin up a server that runs a website hosting the tests, which are targeting JavaScript code that should run in a browser. Karma then opened available browsers to access the hosted website running the...