Book Image

Modern JavaScript Applications

By : Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Modern JavaScript Applications

By: Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Over the years, JavaScript has become vital to the development of a wide range of applications with different architectures. But JS moves lightning fast, and it’s easy to fall behind. Modern JavaScript Applications is designed to get you exploring the latest features of JavaScript and how they can be applied to develop high-quality applications with different architectures. Begin by creating a single page application that builds on the innovative MVC approach using AngularJS, then move forward to develop an enterprise-level application with the microservices architecture using Node to build web services. After that, shift your focus to network programming concepts as you build a real-time web application with websockets. Learn to build responsive, declarative UIs with React and Bootstrap, and see how the performance of web applications can be enhanced using Functional Reactive Programming (FRP). Along the way, explore how the power of JavaScript can be increased multi-fold with high performance techniques. By the end of the book, you’ll be a skilled JavaScript developer with a solid knowledge of the latest JavaScript techniques, tools, and architecture to build modern web apps.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Modern JavaScript Applications
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Getting started with JSX


Writing JavaScript to define a tree-like structure and attributes while building UI using React is difficult and also makes it difficult to understand the UI. So, the React team came up with an alternative syntax to write React code, which is easier to write and understand. This alternate syntax is called JSX. JSX stands for JavaScript syntax extension. It looks similar to XML. Files that contain JSX code have the.jsx extension.

Compiling JSX

Of course, browsers and server-side engines cannot understand and interpret JSX; therefore, we need to compile JSX into pure JavaScript before using it.

There are various open source JSX compilers. You can find the list at https://github.com/facebook/react/wiki/Complementary-Tools#build-tools. The most popular and recommended compiler for JSX is Babel. Babel can be installed (https://babeljs.io/docs/setup/), we can use the Babel compiler online (https://babeljs.io/repl/), and we can also embed the Babel compiler in our HTML page...